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The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site and Ebenezer
Baptist Church will commemorate the annual observance of King
Remembrance Week which honors the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. April 4-8, 2016. To commence the Park’s week
long series of public activities, a special Wreath-Laying Ceremony will
take place at Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Heritage Sanctuary in
Atlanta, Georgia on Monday April 4, 2016 at 5:30pm. This year marks the
48th anniversary of the death of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine
Motel in Memphis, Tennessee and was brought home to be buried in the
Sweet Auburn community. On April 9, 1968, his funeral took place at
Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and Morehouse College. To reflect upon
that solemn occasion in history, the National Park Service along with
members of Ebenezer Baptist Church will place a replica of the 1968
wreath on the historic location of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Heritage
Sanctuary as it appeared on April 9, 1968. There will be a brief program
with remarks by National Park Service officials and other dignitaries
before laying the wreath upon the church’s façade.

The annual April 4th Commemoration at the National Civil Rights Museum is a … life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the anniversary of his death at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. … music selections, a ceremonial wreath laying and a

The King Assassination Conspiracy: Betrayed by Judas

On March 28 1968 King was leading a march
in downtown Memphis when a masonic planned riot broke out and two Negro Masonic
assassins chased King and Abernathy with the intent to assassinate both King
and Abernathy on March 28.

King and Abernathy were able to find
refuge at a white business until the white print shop owner was able to safely escort
King and Abernathy out of town.

On April 3, 1968, Loree Bailey, the co-owner of
the Lorain Motel received a call from a member of Kings inner circle in Atlanta
requesting that a specific room on the second floor be reserve for King.
(King had always stayed in a secure room on the 1st floor.) On April 4,
Loree Bailey overheard a member of Kings entourage asking him to come out of
his room and speak to a small group that had assemble in the parking lot.
Loree Bailey knew that King was in bed suffering from a severe headache but
this member of Kings inner circle insisted that King come out and talk to the
people. King reluctantly came out of his room to speak to the small crowd when
he was shoot. Loree knew the identity of the Judas who had Dr. King set-up
to be assassinated. There
were Negro masonic assassins in Memphis the day of
the assassination one from Forrest City Arkansas. Were these the same assassins who attempted to kill King a week earlier? According to testimony from eye witnesses from the King
family vs. US government trial, the gun smoke came from the bushes across from
the motel and not from the bathroom window at the boarding house where Ray had stayed.

Dr. ML King and Loree Bailey were killed by Negro Masonic Assassins doing the dirty work of their white masonic slave masters.

Was the Judas who betrayed King following orders from his Masonic White Master?

Loree
Bailey was killed, hung in the stairwell of her motel only hours after
the King assassination. The official cover-up statement said that Loree
Bailey had a stroke on April 4th and died a few days later.

Who
was the Judas who set-up King? Was King assassination a Masonic hit?
Was a beer distributorship part of the payoff?Steve Cokley said it best
in his video.

The 47th
anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination should
inspire us all to reimagine this political revolutionary’s final act as a
statesman and civil rights leader.

In the afterglow of the March on Washington and the
Selma-to-Montgomery march, King became a pillar of fire, rejecting the
course of political moderation and social reform that had made him
palatable to white leaders and a hero to African Americans.

King’s final years
found him linking the struggle for racial justice to a wider crusade to
end war and poverty. Tellingly, his comprehensive approach, which
focused on changing America’s foreign and domestic policies as well as
hearts and minds, found him under attack by critics who claimed that he
was in over his head on the subject of Vietnam and foolish to break with
former ally President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The radical King formed an anti-war political alliance with black
power leader Stokely Carmichael. On April 15, 1967, in New York City, King and Carmichael
headlined the largest anti-war rally in American history to that date,
placing two of the era’s leading black political activists at the
forefront of a still-unpopular anti-war movement.

King had also publicly repudiated the war in Vietnam exactly one year
to the day before his death in a speech at Riverside Church in New York
City. His speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” announced
his formal break with both the Johnson Administration (he would never
visit the White House again) and political moderation.

Journalists and newspapers immediately attacked King for going beyond
his civil rights portfolio into the world of foreign policy and
international politics. Many publicly denounced him for having
irrevocably damaged the black freedom struggle by linking it to the
Vietnam War. King’s public approval ratings dropped precipitously among
whites and blacks for his uncompromising stance.

His final speech, in Memphis, Tenn., where he aided 1,000 striking
black sanitation workers, concluded with biblical references to having
seen the “promised land,” and is noteworthy for its rhetorical and political combativeness.

King’s political evolution remains unacknowledged by most of the
American public, leading to the irony of critics of the
#BlackLivesMatter movement asserting that contemporary protesters would
do well to follow in the footsteps of King and other heroes of the civil
rights era. Missing from such criticism is the reality of the later
King, the prophet who, after being recognized in his own lifetime, was
thoroughly disregarded by past allies, politicians and the public for
speaking truth to power in a manner that made the entire nation
uncomfortable.

At the end of his life, King asserted that racism, militarism and materialism represented the greatest threats to humanity that the world had ever seen. History has proved King’s words to be prophetic.

The massive protests that erupted last year in the wake of grand jury
decisions not to indict police officers in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten
Island, N.Y., represent, in both symbolic and substantive ways, a
continuation of the radical King’s political work.

Updating King’s “triple threat” means understanding the ways in which
the militarism of which he spoke has invaded our domestic sphere
through mass incarceration; how materialism promotes the largest income
and wealth gap between the rich and poor in American history; and how
institutional racism contours our current social, political and economic
systems.

King spent his whole life preaching an unusually eloquent message
that black lives mattered. His two most famous political sermons (at the
March on Washington in 1963 and in Montgomery, Ala., in 1965) were
broadcast by every major television network.

Yet there were many more radical speeches to be made, ones that
linked political revolution to radical policy changes that went beyond
the vote, that advocated economic redistribution and an end to war,
along with a “revolution in values”
designed to transform the very foundations of American democracy. It is
this King whom #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations most accurately reflect
and honor, even as he’s the one our nation continues to ignore.

Assassination Conspiracy Trial

Reprint from the King Center:

After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in
Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on
December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. In a
press statement held the following day in Atlanta, Mrs. Coretta Scott
King welcomed the verdict, saying , “There is abundant evidence of a
major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin
Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated
our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel
that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict
is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for
America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know
that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury
deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence
that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the
conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies,
were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also
affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James
Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.
I want to make it clear that my family has no interest in retribution.
Instead, our sole concern has been that the full truth of the
assassination has been revealed and adjudicated in a court of law… My
husband once said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends
toward justice.” To-day, almost 32 years after my husband and the father
of my four children was assassinated, I feel that the jury’s verdict
clearly affirms this principle. With this faith, we can begin the 21st
century and the new millennium with a new spirit of hope and healing.”

Across from the LorraineMotel was Fire Station no. 2. Who ordered … to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, your …

www.tucradio.org/Who_killed_MLK.pdfIn
the complaint filed by the King family, “King versus Jowers and Other
Unknown Co-Conspirators,” the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was
never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real
defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows
behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings
and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies —
particularly the FBI and Army intelligence — with organizing,
subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge
guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court
within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.

I can
hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants,
only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to
end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic
neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went
on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week
before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the
Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me
and said, “Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J.
Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the
trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?”

Many
qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came
not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of
evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the
plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.)
Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant
agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.

But
these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the
government’s “sovereign immunity,” it is not possible to put a U.S.
intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step
would require authorization by the federal government, which is not
likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an
independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and
lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in
Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more
through them) to see the forces behind King’s martyrdom and to feel the
responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end,
twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to
hear: guilty as charged.

We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.

Loyd
Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days
in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said
through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth
Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against
the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William
Pepper’s progress as James Earl Ray’s attorney in uncovering Jowers’s
role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live.
He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told
there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the
police “wouldn’t be there that night.”

In
that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the
Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the
murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto.
Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold
at his restaurant, Jim’s Grill, the back door of which opened onto the
dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited
the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a
box.

As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe,
other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto’s involvement
in King’s slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:15
pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto’s warehouse
in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the
warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying,
“Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony.”

Café-owner
Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto’s in the late 1970’s, testified
that Liberto had told her he “had Martin Luther King killed.” Addison’s
son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked
Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.

“[Liberto]
said, `I didn’t kill the nigger but I had it done.’ I said, `What about
that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?’ He says, `Ahh, he
wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man . . .
a setup man.'”

The
jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers
made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King’s son Dexter and
former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings
to plan the assassination occurred at Jim’s Grill. He said the planners
included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell
McCollough (who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency, and who
is referenced in the trial transcript as Merrell McCullough), MPD
Lieutentant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a third police officer, and
two men Jowers did not know but thought were federal agents.

Young,
who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape identifying
McCollough as the man kneeling beside King’s body on the balcony in a
famous photograph. According to witness Colby Vernon Smith, McCollough
had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders,
which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In
his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was “the guy
who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see Martin.”

Jowers
says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he received a
smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim’s Grill from Clark. He broke the
rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked
it up the next day. Jowers said he didn’t actually see who fired the
shot that killed King, but thought it was Clark, the MPD’s best
marksman.

Young
testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that the aging,
ailing Jowers “wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to
confess it and be free of it.” Jowers denied, however, that he knew the
plot’s purpose was to kill King — a claim that seemed implausible to
Dexter King and Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had
directed Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn’t know the
target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson suggests
he was not naïve on this point.

Loyd Jowers’s story opened the door to testimony that explored the systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic areas:

James Lawson, King’s friend and an organizer with SCLC,
testified that King’s stands on Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign
had created enemies in Washington. He said King’s speech at New York’s Riverside Church
on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam War and identified the
U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today,” provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI.

Hatred
and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold
the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down
the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil
disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw
the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent
revolution that would redistribute income.

“I have no doubt,” Lawson said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination.”

Coretta
Scott King testified that her husband had to return to Memphis in early
April 1968 because of a violent demonstration there for which he had
been blamed. Moments after King arrived in Memphis to join the
sanitation workers’ march there on March 28, 1968, the scene turned
violent — subverted by government provocateurs, Lawson said. Thus King
had to return to Memphis on April 3 and prepare for a truly nonviolent
march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC could still carry out a nonviolent
campaign in Washington.

On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum, a black
firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King’s “I’ve Been to the
Mountain Top” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On his return home,
Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and was told he had
been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from Fire Station 2,
located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to Fire Station 31.
Newsum testified that he was not needed at the new station. However, he
was needed at his old station because his departure left it “out of
service unless somebody else was detailed to my company in my stead.”
After making many queries, Newsum was eventually told he had been
transferred by request of the police department.

The
only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E. Wallace,
testified that he, too, received orders from his superior officer on the
night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire station far removed
from the Lorraine Motel. He was later told vaguely that he had been
threatened.

Wallace
guessed it was because “I was putting out fires,” he told the jury with
a smile. Asked if he ever received a satisfactory explanation for his
transfer Wallace answered, “No. Never did. Not to this day.”

In the March-April Probe,
Mike Vinson described the similar removal of Ed Redditt, a black
Memphis Police Department detective, from his Fire Station 2
surveillance post two hours before King’s murder.

To
understand the Redditt incident, it is important to note that it was
Redditt himself who initiated his watch on Dr. King from the firehouse
across the street. Redditt testified that when King’s party and the
police accompanying them (including Detective Redditt) arrived from the
airport at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, he “noticed something that was
unusual.” When Inspector Don Smith, who was in charge of security, told
Redditt he could leave, Redditt “noticed there was nobody else there.
In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King [when Redditt had been
part of a black security team for King], we stayed with him. I saw
nobody with him. So I went across the street and asked the Fire
Department could we come in and observe from the rear, which we did.”
Given Redditt’s concerns for King’s safety, his particular watch on the
Lorraine may not have fit into others’ plans.

Redditt
testified that late in the afternoon of April 4, MPD Intelligence
Officer Eli Arkin came to Fire Station 2 to take him to Central
Headquarters. There Police and Fire Director Frank Holloman (formerly an
FBI agent for 25 years, seven of them as supervisor of J. Edgar
Hoover’s office) ordered Redditt home, against his wishes and
accompanied by Arkin. The reason Holloman gave Redditt for his removal
from the King watch Redditt had initiated the day before was that his
life had been threatened.

In
an interview after the trial, Redditt told me the story of how his 1978
testimony on this question before the House Select Committee on
Assassinations was part of a heavily pressured cover-up. “It was a
farce,” he said, “a total farce.”

Redditt
had been subpoenaed by the HSCA to testify, as he came to realize, not
so much on his strange removal from Fire Station 2 as the fact that he
had spoken about it openly to writers and researchers. The HSCA focused
narrowly on the discrepancy between Redditt’s surveiling King (as he was
doing) and acting as security (an impression Redditt had given writers
interviewing him) in order to discredit the story of his removal.
Redditt was first grilled by the committee for eight straight hours in a
closed executive session. After a day of hostile questioning, Redditt
finally said late in the afternoon, “I came here as a friend of the
investigation, not as an enemy of the investigation. You don’t want to
deal with the truth.” He told the committee angrily that if the secret
purpose behind the King conspiracy was, like the JFK conspiracy, “to
protect the country, just tell the American people! They’ll be happy!
And quit fooling the folks and trying to pull the wool over their eyes.”

When
the closed hearing was over, Redditt received a warning call from a
friend in the White House who said, “Man, your life isn’t worth a wooden
nickel.”

Redditt
said his public testimony the next day “was a set-up”: “The bottom line
on that one was that Senator Baker decided that I wouldn’t go into this
open hearing without an attorney. When the lawyer and I arrived at the
hearing, we were ushered right back out across town to the executive
director in charge of the investigation. [We] looked through a book, to
look at the questions and answers.”

“So
in essence what they were saying was: `This is what you’re going to
answer to, and this is how you’re going to answer.’ It was all made up
— all designed, questions and answers, what to say and what not to say.
A total farce.”

Former
MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the witness stand.
Williams had been responsible for forming a special security unit of
black officers whenever King came to Memphis (the unit Redditt had
served on earlier). Williams took pride in providing the best possible
protection for Dr. King, which included, he said, advising him never to
stay at the Lorraine “because we couldn’t furnish proper security
there.” (“It was just an open view,” he explained to me later, “Anybody
could . . . There was no protection at all. To me that was a set-up from
the very beginning.”)

Hatred and
fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the
Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the
nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil
disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw
the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent
revolution that would redistribute income. “I have no doubt,” Lawson
said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his
assassination.”

For
King’s April 3, 1968 arrival, however, Williams was for some reason not
asked to form the special black bodyguard. He was told years later by
his inspector (a man whom Jowers identified as a participant in the
planning meetings at Jim’s Grill) that the change occurred because
somebody in King’s entourage had asked specifically for no black
security officers. Williams told the jury he was bothered by the
omission “even to this day.”

Leon
Cohen, a retired New York City police officer, testified that in 1968
he had become friendly with the Lorraine Motel’s owner and manager,
Walter Bailey (now deceased). On the morning after King’s murder, Cohen
spoke with a visibly upset Bailey outside his office at the Lorraine.
Bailey told Cohen about a strange request that had forced him to change
King’s room to the location where he was shot.

Bailey
explained that the night before King’s arrival he had received a call
“from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta.” The caller (whom Bailey
said he knew but referred to only by the pronoun “he”) wanted the motel
owner to change King’s room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to
moving King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel
office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room exposed to
public view.

“If they had listened to me,” Bailey said, “this wouldn’t have happened.”

Philip Melanson, author of the Martin Luther King Assassination (1991),
described his investigation into the April 4 pullback of four tactical
police units that had been patrolling the immediate vicinity of the
Lorraine Motel. Melanson asked MPD Inspector Sam Evans (now deceased),
commander of the units, why they were pulled back the morning of April
4, in effect making an assassin’s escape much easier. Evans said he gave
the order at the request of a local pastor connected with King’s party,
Rev. Samuel Kyles. (Melanson wrote in his book that Kyles emphatically
denied making any such request.) Melanson said the idea that MPD
security would be determined at such a time by a local pastor’s request
made no sense whatsoever.

Olivia
Catling lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street.
Catling had planned to walk down the street the evening of April 4 in
the hope of catching a glimpse of King at the motel. She testified that
when she heard the shot a little after six o’clock, she said, “Oh, my
God, Dr. King is at that hotel!” She ran with her two children to the
corner of Mulberry and Huling streets, just north of the Lorraine. She
saw a man in a checkered shirt come running out of the alley beside a
building across from the Lorraine. The man jumped into a green 1965
Chevrolet just as a police car drove up behind him. He gunned the
Chevrolet around the corner and up Mulberry past Catling’s house moving
her to exclaim, “It’s going to take us six months to pay for the rubber
he’s burning up!!” The police, she said, ignored the man and blocked off
a street, leaving his car free to go the opposite way.

I
visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she had seen
running was not James Earl Ray. “I will go into my grave saying that was
not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was heavier than Ray.”

“The
police,” she told me, “asked not one neighbor [around the Lorraine],
`What did you see?’ Thirty-one years went by. Nobody came and asked one
question. I often thought about that. I even had nightmares over that,
because they never said anything. How did they let him get away?”

Catling
also testified that from her vantage point on the corner of Mulberry
and Huling she could see a fireman standing alone across from the motel
when the police drove up. She heard him say to the police, “The shot
came from that clump of bushes,” indicating the heavily overgrown brushy
area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2.

Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room
at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony,
Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m.
When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the
heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at
the Lorraine’s balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in
the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any
authorities.

In
a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange that was read
into the record, Orange said that on April 4, “James Bevel and I were
driven around by Marrell McCollough, a person who at that time we knew
to be a member of the Invaders, a local community organizing group, and
who we subsequently learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis
Police Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency .
. . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King’s leg dangling over the
balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn’t have been more
than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the
opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up
from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had
any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King’s life,
was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict
buildings.

“I
also remember then turning my attention back to the balcony and seeing
Marrell McCollough up on the balcony kneeling over Dr. King, looking as
though he was checking Dr. King for life signs.

“I
also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o’clock, that
all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It
was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming
house had been cleared . . .

“I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.

“When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way.

“I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968.”

Also
read into the record were depositions made by Solomon Jones to the FBI
and to the Memphis police. Jones was King’s chauffeur in Memphis. The
FBI document, dated April 13, 1968, says that after King was shot, when
Jones looked across Mulberry Street into the brushy area, “he got a
quick glimpse of a person with his back toward Mulberry Street. . . .
This person was moving rather fast, and he recalls that he believed he
was wearing some sort of light-colored jacket with some sort of a hood
or parka.” In his 11:30 p.m., April 4, 1968 police interview, Jones
provides the same basic information concerning a person leaving the
brushy area hurriedly.

Maynard
Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation
Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming
house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the
jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans “requesting
assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the
vicinity of the assassination.” Stiles called another superintendent of
sanitation, who assembled a crew. “They went to that site, and under the
direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there,
proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.”
Stiles identified the site as an area overgrown with brush and bushes
across from the Lorraine Motel.

Within
hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were
identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been
sanitized by orders of the police.

Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over two years of hearings
on the rifle, testified that “67% of the bullets from my tests did not
match the Ray rifle.” He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped
with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet
taken from King’s body, and therefore were from a different lot of
ammunition. And because the rifle’s scope had not been sited, Brown
said, “this weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a
barn.” Holding up the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle, Judge Brown
told the jury, “It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon.”
Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama,
had been Ray’s attorney in 1968. (On the eve of his trial, Ray replaced
Hanes and his father, Arthur Hanes Sr., by Percy Foreman, a decision Ray
told the Haneses one week later was the biggest mistake of his life.)
Hanes testified that in the summer of 1968 he interviewed Guy Canipe,
owner of the Canipe Amusement Company. Canipe was a witness to the
dropping in his doorway of a bundle that held a trove of James Earl Ray
memorabilia, including the rifle, unfired bullets, and a radio with
Ray’s prison identification number on it. This dropped bundle, heaven
(or otherwise) sent for the State’s case against Ray, can be accepted as
credible evidence through a willing suspension of disbelief. As Judge
Hanes summarized the State’s lone-assassin theory (with reference to an
exhibit depicting the scene), “James Earl Ray had fired the shot from
the bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his room
and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had proceeded across the
walkway the length of the building to the back where that stair from
that door came up, had come down the stairs out the door, placed the
Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe
entryway.” Then Ray presumably got in his car seconds before the
police’s arrival, driving from downtown Memphis to Atlanta unchallenged
in his white Mustang.

Concerning
his interview with the witness who was the cornerstone of this theory,
Judge Hanes told the jury that Guy Canipe (now deceased) provided
“terrific evidence”: “He said that the package was dropped in his
doorway by a man headed south down Main Street on foot, and that this
happened at about ten minutes before the shot was fired [emphasis added].”

Hanes
thought Canipe’s witnessing the bundle-dropping ten minutes before the
shot was very credible for another reason. It so happened (as confirmed
by Philip Melanson’s research) that at 6:00 p.m. one of the MPD tactical
units that had been withdrawn earlier by Inspector Evans, TACT 10, had
returned briefly to the area with its 16 officers for a rest break at
Fire Station 2. Thus, as Hanes testified, with the firehouse brimming
with police, some already watching King across the street, “when they
saw Dr. King go down, the fire house erupted like a beehive . . . In
addition to the time involved [in Ray’s presumed odyssey from the
bathroom to the car], it was circumstantially almost impossible to
believe that somebody had been able to throw that [rifle] down and
leaave right in the face of that erupting fire station.”

When
I spoke with Judge Hanes after the trial about the startling evidence
he had received from Canipe, he commented, “That’s what I’ve been saying
for 30 years.”
William Hamblin testified not about the rifle thrown down in
the Canipe doorway but rather the smoking rifle Loyd Jowers said he
received at his back door from Earl Clark right after the shooting.
Hamblin recounted a story he was told many times by his friend James
McCraw, who had died.

James
McCraw is already well-known to researchers as the taxi driver who
arrived at the rooming house to pick up Charlie Stephens shortly before
6:00 p.m. on April 4. In a deposition read earlier to the jury, McCraw
said he found Stephens in his room lying on his bed too drunk to get up,
so McCraw turned out the light and left without him — minutes before
Stephens, according to the State, identified Ray in profile passing down
the hall from the bathroom. McCraw also said the bathroom door next to
Stephen’s room was standing wide open, and there was no one in the
bathroom — where again, according to the State, Ray was then balancing
on the tub, about to squeeze the trigger.

William
Hamblin told the jury that he and fellow cab-driver McCraw were close
friends for about 25 years. Hamblin said he probably heard McCraw tell
the same rifle story 50 times, but only when McCraw had been drinking
and had his defenses down.

In
that story, McCraw said that Loyd Jowers had given him the rifle right
after the shooting. According to Hamblin, “Jowers told him to get the
[rifle] and get it out of here now. [McCraw] said that he grabbed his
beer and snatched it out. He had the rifle rolled up in an oil cloth,
and he leapt out the door and did away with it.” McCraw told Hamblin he
threw the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.

Hamblin
said McCraw never revealed publicly what he knew of the rifle because,
like Jowers, he was afraid of being indicted: “He really wanted to come
out with it, but he was involved in it. And he couldn’t really tell the
truth.”

William
Pepper accepted Hamblin’s testimony about McCraw’s disposal of the
rifle over Jowers’s claim to Dexter King that he gave the rifle to Raul.
Pepper said in his closing argument that the actual murder weapon had
been lying “at the bottom of the Mississippi River for over thirty-one
years.”

Maynard
Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation
Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming
house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the
jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans “requesting
assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the
vicinity of the assassination. . . . They went to that site, and under
the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there,
proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.” .
. . Within hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that
witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the
shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.
One of the most significant developments in the Memphis trial
was the emergence of the mysterious Raul through the testimony of a
series of witnesses.

In
a 1995 deposition by James Earl Ray that was read to the jury, Ray told
of meeting Raul in Montreal in the summer of 1967, three months after
Ray had escaped from a Missouri prison. According to Ray, Raul guided
Ray’s movements, gave him money for the Mustang car and the rifle, and
used both to set him up in Memphis.

Andrew
Young and Dexter King described their meeting with Jowers and Pepper at
which Pepper had shown Jowers a spread of photographs, and Jowers
picked out one as the person named Raul who brought him the rifle to
hold at Jim’s Grill. Pepper displayed the same spread of photos in
court, and Young and King pointed out the photo Jowers had identified as
Raul. (Private investigator John Billings said in separate testimony
that this picture was a passport photograph from 1961, when Raul had
immigrated from Portugal to the U.S.)

The
additional witnesses who identified the photo as Raul’s included:
British merchant seaman Sidney Carthew, who in a videotaped deposition
from England said he had met Raul (who offered to sell him guns) and a
man he thinks was Ray (who wanted to be smuggled onto his ship) in
Montreal in the summer of 1967; Glenda and Roy Grabow, who recognized
Raul as a gunrunner they knew in Houston in the `60s and `70s and who
told Glenda in a rage that he had killed Martin Luther King; Royce
Wilburn, Glenda’s brother, who also knew Raul in Houston; and British
television producer Jack Saltman, who had obtained the passport photo
and showed it to Ray in prison, who identified it as the photo of the
person who had guided him.

Saltman
and Pepper, working on independent investigations, located Raul in
1995. He was living quietly with his family in the northeastern U.S. It
was there in 1997 that journalist Barbara Reis of the Lisbon Publico,
working on a story about Raul, spoke with a member of his family. Reis
testified that she had spoken in Portuguese to a woman in Raul’s family
who, after first denying any connection to Ray’s Raul, said “they” had
visited them. “Who?” Reis asked. “The government,” said the woman. She
said government agents had visited them three times over a three-year
period. The government, she said, was watching over them and monitoring
their phone calls. The woman took comfort and satisfaction in the fact
that her family (so she believed) was being protected by the government.

In
his closing argument Pepper said of Raul: “Now, as I understand it, the
defense had invited Raul to appear here. He is outside this
jurisdiction, so a subpoena would be futile. But he was asked to appear
here. In earlier proceedings there were attempts to depose him, and he
resisted them. So he has not attempted to come forward at all and tell
his side of the story or to defend himself.”

Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified
that he was on duty the morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers
approached him. The officers said they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine
Motel. Weeden said they carried briefcases and indicated they had
cameras. Weeden showed the officers to the roof of the fire station. He
left them at the edge of its northeast corner behind a parapet wall.
From there the Army officers had a bird’s-eye view of Dr. King’s balcony
doorway and could also look down on the brushy area adjacent to the
fire station.

The
testimony of writer Douglas Valentine filled in the background of the
men Carthel Weeden had taken up to the roof of Fire Station 2. While
Valentine was researching his book The Phoenix Program (1990), on
the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence program against Vietnamese
villagers, he talked with veterans in military intelligence who had been
re-deployed from the Vietnam War to the sixties antiwar movement. They
told him that in 1968 the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept
Martin Luther King under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in
Memphis April 4. As Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program, they “reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away.”

Testimony
which juror David Morphy later described as “awesome” was that of
former CIA operative Jack Terrell, a whistle-blower in the Iran-Contra
scandal. Terrell, who was dying of liver cancer in Florida, testified by
videotape that his close friend J.D. Hill had confessed to him that he
had been a member of an Army sniper team in Memphis assigned to shoot
“an unknown target” on April 4. After training for a triangular
shooting, the snipers were on their way into Memphis to take up
positions in a watertower and two buildings when their mission was
suddenly cancelled. Hill said he realized, when he learned of King’s
assassination the next day, that the team must have been part of a
contingency plan to kill King if another shooter failed.

Terrell
said J.D. Hill was shot to death. His wife was charged with shooting
Hill (in response to his drinking), but she was not indicted. From the
details of Hill’s death, Terrell thought the story about Hill’s wife
shooting him was a cover, and that his friend had been assassinated. In
an interview, Terrell said the CIA’s heavy censorship of his book Disposable Patriot (1992) included changing the paragraph on J.D. Hill’s death, so that it read as if Terrell thought Hill’s wife was responsible.

Walter Fauntroy, Dr. King’s colleague and a 20-year member of
Congress, chaired the subcommittee of the 1976-78 House Select Committee
on Assassinations that investigated King’s assassination. Fauntroy
testified in Memphis that in the course of the HSCA investigation “it
was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces.” He
discovered electronic bugs on his phone and TV set. When Richard
Sprague, HSCA’s first chief investigator, said he would make available
all CIA, FBI, and military intelligence records, he became a focus of
controversy. Sprague was forced to resign. His successor made no demands
on U.S. intelligence agencies. Such pressures contributed to the
subcommittee’s ending its investigation, as Fauntroy said, “without
having thoroughly investigated all of the evidence that was apparent.”
Its formal conclusion was that Ray assassinated King, that he probably
had help, and that the government was not involved.

When
I interviewed Fauntroy in a van on his way back to the Memphis Airport,
I asked about the implications of his statements in an April 4, 1997 Atlanta Constitution
article. The article said Fauntroy now believed “Ray did not fire the
shot that killed King and was part of a larger conspiracy that possibly
involved federal law enforcement agencies, ” and added: “Fauntroy said
he kept silent about his suspicions because of fear for himself and his
family.”

Fauntroy
told me that when he left Congress in 1991 he had the opportunity to
read through his files on the King assassination, including raw
materials that he’d never seen before. Among them was information from
J. Edgar Hoover’s logs. There he learned that in the three weeks before
King’s murder the FBI chief held a series of meetings with “persons
involved with the CIA and military intelligence in the Phoenix operation
in Southeast Asia.” Why? Fauntroy also discovered there had been Green
Berets and military intelligence agents in Memphis when King was killed.
“What were they doing there?” he asked.

When
Fauntroy had talked about his decision to write a book about what he’d
“uncovered since the assassination committee closed down,” he was
promptly investigated and charged by the Justice Department with having
violated his financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer told
him that he could not understand why the Justice Department would bring
up a charge on the technicality of one misdated check. Fauntroy said he
interpreted the Justice Department’s action to mean: “Look, we’ll get
you on something if you continue this way. . . . I just thought: I’ll
tell them I won’t go and finish the book, because it’s surely not worth
it.”

At
the conclusion of his trial testimony, Fauntroy also spoke about his
fear of an FBI attempt to kill James Earl Ray when he escaped from
Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in June 1977. Congressman
Fauntroy had heard reports about an FBI SWAT team having been sent into
the area around the prison to shoot Ray and prevent his testifying at
the HSCA hearings. Fauntroy asked HSCA chair Louis Stokes to alert
Tennesssee Governor Ray Blanton to the danger to the HSCA’s star witness
and Blanton’s most famous prisoner. When Stokes did, Blanton called off
the FBI SWAT team, Ray was caught safely by local authorities, and in
Fauntroy’s words, “we all breathed a sigh of relief.”

The
Memphis jury also learned how a 1993-98 Tennessee State investigation
into the King assassination was, if not a cover-up, then an inquiry
noteworthy for its lack of witnesses. Lewis Garrison had subpoenaed the
head of the investigation, Mark Glankler, in an effort to discover
evidence helpful to Jowers’s defense. William Pepper then cross-examined
Glankler on the witnesses he had interviewed in his investigation:

A. No, sir.
So
it goes — downhill. The above is Glankler’s high-water mark: He got
two out of the first ten (if one counts Charles and Peggy Hurley as a
yes). Pepper questioned Glankler about 25 key witnesses. The jury was
familiar with all of them from prior testimony in the trial. Glankler
could recall his office interviewing a total of three. At the
twenty-fifth-named witness, Earl Caldwell, Pepper finally let Glankler
go:

Q. Did you ever interview a former New York Times journalist, a New York Daily News correspondent named Earl Caldwell?

A. Earl Caldwell? Not that I recall.

Q. You never interviewed him in the course of your investigation?

A. I just don’t recall that name.

MR. PEPPER: I have no further comments about this investigation — no further questions for this investigator.

Pepper
went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the
assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies
responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper
asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in
the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their
affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today
it is much worse in my view” — “the decision-making processes in the
United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very
economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times
of changes [being actived by King].”

To say that
U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the
Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic
powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed
him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a
threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how
determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was
revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill
him.

The vision behind the trial

In his sprawling, brilliant work that underlies the trial, Orders to Kill
(1995), William Pepper introduced readers to most of the 70 witnesses
who took the stand in Memphis or were cited by deposition, tape, and
other witnesses. To keep this article from reading like either an
encyclopedia or a Dostoevsky novel, I have highlighted only a few.
(Thanks to the King Center, the full trial trascript is available online at http://www.thekingcenter.com/tkc/trial.html.)
What Pepper’s work has accomplished in print and in court can be
measured by the intensity of the media attacks on him, shades of Jim
Garrison. But even Garrison did not gain the support of the Kennedy
family (in his case) or achieve a guilty verdict. The Memphis trial has
opened wide a door to our assassination politics. Anyone who walks
through it is faced by an either/or: to declare naked either the empire
or oneself.

The
King family has chosen the former. The vision behind the trial is at
least as much theirs as it is William Pepper’s, for ultimately it is the
vision of Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta King explained to the jury her
family’s purpose in pursuing the lawsuit against Jowers: “This is not
about money. We’re concerned about the truth, having the truth come out
in a court of law so that it can be documented for all. I’ve always felt
that somehow the truth would be known, and I hoped that I would live to
see it. It is important I think for the sake of healing so many people
— my family, other people, the nation.”

Dexter King, the plaintiffs’ final witness, said the trial was about why his
father had been killed: “From a holistic side, in terms of the people,
in terms of the masses, yes, it has to be dealt with because it is not
about who killed Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not
necessarily about all of those details. It is about: Why was he
killed? Because if you answer the why, you will understand the same
things are still happening. Until we address that, we’re all in trouble.
Because if it could happen to him, if it can happen to this family, it
can happen to anybody.

“It
is so amazing for me that as soon as this issue of potential
involvement of the federal government came up, all of a sudden the media
just went totally negative against the family. I couldn’t understand
that. I kept asking my mother, `What is going on?’

“She
reminded me. She said, `Dexter, your dad and I have lived through this
once already. You have to understand that when you take a stand against
the establishment, first, you will be attacked. There is an attempt to
discredit. Second, [an attempt] to try and character-assassinate. And
third, ultimately physical termination or assassination.’

“Now
the truth of the matter is if my father had stopped and not spoken out,
if he had just somehow compromised, he would probably still be here
with us today. But the minute you start talking about redistribution of
wealth and stopping a major conflict, which also has economic
ramifications . . . “

In
his closing argument, William Pepper identified economic power as the
root reason for King’s assassination: “When Martin King opposed the war,
when he rallied people to oppose the war, he was threatening the bottom
lines of some of the largest defense contractors in this country. This
was about money. He was threatening the weapons industry, the hardware,
the armaments industries, that would all lose as a result of the end of
the war.

“The
second aspect of his work that also dealt with money that caused a
great deal of consternation in the circles of power in this land had to
do with his commitment to take a massive group of people to Washington. .
. . Now he began to talk about a redistribution of wealth, in this the
wealthiest country in the world.”

Pepper
went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the
assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies
responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper
asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in
the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their
affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today
it is much worse in my view” — “the decision-making processes in the
United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very
economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times
of changes [being actived by King].”

To
say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the
verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that
the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those
agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign,
King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary
force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached
Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the
plot to kill him.

Dexter
King testified to the truth of his father’s death with transforming
clarity: “If what you are saying goes against what certain people
believe you should be saying, you will be dealt with — maybe not the
way you are dealt with in China, which is overtly. But you will be dealt
with covertly. The result is the same.

“We
are talking about a political assassination in modern-day times, a
domestic political assassination. Of course, it is ironic, but I was
watching a special on the CIA. They say, `Yes, we’ve participated in
assassinations abroad but, no, we could never do anything like that
domestically.’ Well, I don’t know. . . . Whether you call it CIA or some
other innocuous acronym or agency, killing is killing.

“The
issue becomes: What do we do about this? Do we endorse a policy in this
country, in this life, that says if we don’t agree with someone, the
only means to deal with it is through elimination and termination? I
think my father taught us the opposite, that you can overcome without
violence.

“We’re
not in this to make heads roll. We’re in this to use the teachings that
my father taught us in terms of nonviolent reconciliation. It works. We
know that it works. So we’re not looking to put people in prison. What
we’re looking to do is get the truth out so that this nation can learn
and know officially. If the family of the victim, if we’re saying we’re
willing to forgive and embark upon a process that allows for
reconciliation, why can’t others?”

When
pressed by Pepper to name a specific amount of damages for the death of
his father, Dexter King said, “One hundred dollars.”

The Verdict

The
jury returned with a verdict after two and one-half hours. Judge James
E. Swearengen of Shelby County Circuit Court, a gentle African-American
man in his last few days before retirement, read the verdict aloud. The
courtroom was now crowded with spectators, almost all black.

“In
answer to the question, `Did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to
do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King?’ your answer is `Yes.'” The man on
my left leaned forward and whispered softly, “Thank you, Jesus.”

The
judge continued: “Do you also find that others, including governmental
agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?’
Your answer to that one is also `Yes.'” An even more heartfelt whisper:
“Thank you, Jesus!”

Perhaps
the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands
the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to.
In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy
was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil
disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and
military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously.
They dealt with him in Memphis.

Thirty-two years
after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King
with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become
evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its
“limited re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a
footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up — just as it
continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert
Kennedy and Malcolm X.

David
Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: “We can look
back on it and say that we did change history. But that’s not why we did
it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and
just too many odd coincidences.

“Everything
from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on
Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military
people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to
that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go
and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very,
very odd.”

I
drove the few blocks to the house on Mulberry Street, one block north
of the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum). When I
rapped loudly on Olivia Catling’s security door, she was several minutes
in coming. She said she’d had the flu. I told her the jury’s verdict,
and she smiled. “So I can sleep now. For years I could still hear that
shot. After 31 years, my mind is at ease. So I can sleep now, knowing
that some kind of peace has been brought to the King family. And that’s
the best part about it.”

Perhaps
the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands
the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to.
In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy
was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil
disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and
military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously.
They dealt with him in Memphis.

Thirty-two
years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr.
King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become
evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its
“limited re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a
footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up — just as it
continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert
Kennedy and Malcolm X.

The
faithful in a nonviolent movement that hopes to change the distribution
of wealth and power in the U.S.A. — as Dr. King’s vision, if made
real, would have done in 1968 — should be willing to receive the same
kind of reward that King did in Memphis. As each of our religious
traditions has affirmed from the beginning, that recurring story of
martyrdom (“witness”) is one of ultimate transformation and cosmic good
news

Sheldon Adelson looks to stamp out growing US movement to boycott Israel

Billionaire gambling magnate and Republican party donor convenes
closed-door meeting to combat US university movement amid growing
Israeli alarm over growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in
US and Europe

Over 30 community groups in Boston protest the decision by the
Northeastern University administration to suspend the campus chapter of
Students for Justice in Palestine.
Photograph: Paul Weiskel/Demotix/Corbis The American gambling magnate and major Republican party donor Sheldon Adelson
is hosting a closed-door meeting of pro-Israel billionaires and
activists at his Las Vegas casino this weekend, to combat the burgeoning
movement on US university campuses to boycott the Jewish state.

The gathering comes amid growing Israeli alarm at the rise of the
decade-old Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in the US
and Europe which the government in Jerusalem contends is antisemitic.
It says the movement is intent on the destruction of the Jewish
homeland because, among other things, some of its leaders support the
“one-state solution” of combining Israel and the Palestinian territories
into a single country with equality for Jewish and Arab citizens.

However, BDS supporters say Adelson’s involvement highlights their
cause because he is a vocal supporter of a single state – albeit one in
which Israel annexes the occupied territories and denies equal rights to Palestinians who he has derided as “an invented people”.

After years of dismissing the BDS movement as marginal and
irrelevant, pro-Israel lobby groups have recently promoted laws against
it in the US Congress and state legislatures. They include legislation
to block the EU from imposing measures against illegal Jewish
settlements in the Palestinian territories.

The issue was also injected into presidential politics last week as a
Republican candidate, Ted Cruz, denounced the boycott movement at a
dinner with Adelson.

“BDS is premised on a lie and it is antisemitism plain and simple,” he said.

Cruz, like other Republican candidates, is seeking financial backing
from Adelson, who poured $150m into the Republicans’ failed effort to
get Barack Obama out of the White House in 2012.

‘It is the strong attempting to strangle the weak’

The boycott movement has drawn inspiration from the sanctions
campaign against apartheid South Africa and has support in several
countries from trade unions, artists such as Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, and religious leaders such as former Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.
But Israeli officials are particularly concerned about its rise on US
university campuses because they fear the erosion of support among
future leaders of the one country Israel regards as a solid ally.

Pro-Israel groups claim the rise of BDS on campus is linked to
radical Islam, that it “de-legitimises” the Jewish state and is making
Jewish students feel unsafe. But BDS leaders say support is driven by
the growing perception of the occupation as a civil rights issue in the
face of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s rejection of a Palestinian
state and revulsion at Israel’s periodic military assaults on Gaza.

Resolutions in support of universities divesting from Israel have
passed on seven campuses this year and been rejected on eight others. In
December 2013, the American Studies Association voted to boycott
Israeli academic institutions. The BDS movement is particularly strong at the University of California, which has about 240,000 students.

“You see a trajectory that follows that famed Mahatma Gandhi quote.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Now we’re at the third
stage which is, then they fight you,” he said. “We’re seeing it in the
public pronouncements of Israeli officials. In the adoption of some of
those positions by American officials. We’re seeing it in legislatures
both at the state and federal level in the United States where there are
initiatives to pass laws that would make it more difficult to advance
BDS victories.”

The meeting of what the Forward, which first reported plans for the Las Vegas summit,
described as “leading Jewish mega-donors” is to be held at Adelson’s
casino and hotel, the Venetian. The Forward said that the billionaire
organisers include the Hollywood entertainment mogul Haim Saban and an
Israeli-born property developer, Adam Milstein.

Several strongly pro-Israel organisations are expected to attend,
including the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federations of North
America. But the increasingly influential J-Street, which opposes BDS,
was not invited, probably because it is also strongly critical of
Netanyahu.

Pro-Israel groups say the BDS movement is a threat to the existence
of the Jewish state because it not only calls for an end to the
occupation but wants millions of Palestinian refugees and their
descendants, now living in Arab countries, to return to their ancestral homes in Israel.

Munayyer said the attempt to paint Israel’s existence as threatened is at odds with how it is seen by many young Americans.

“I think it’s very counterproductive what they’re doing,” he said.
“The younger generation sees Israel as a powerful oppressor using these
massive weapons of war against a stateless people. For billionaires to
get together and throw massive amounts of money to try to counter an
essentially grassroots movement that is being supported by civil society
and by student activists only reinforces that message that it is the
strong attempting to strangle the weak.”

Munayyer described Netanyahu as one of “the movement’s best allies”
after the Israeli prime minster campaigned for reelection on his
opposition to a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu attempted to backtrack on his rejection of a Palestinian
state in the face of strong international criticism, including from
Obama. But his original comments were widely seen as reflecting his true position and the White House made it clear it did not believe his retraction.

This week, Obama warned Israel that it “risks losing credibility”, adding that “the international community does not believe that Israel is serious about a two-state solution”.

That perception is strengthening calls for sanctions as a means to
pressure the Israeli government. Pro-Israel groups are pushing back by
promoting new laws to combat BDS on university campuses and beyond.

Several state legislatures are debating legislation to deter
universities from making a stand against Israeli government policy,
including through threats to funding. Illinois has already banned
state pension funds from investing in companies that boycott Israel.
The Tennessee and Indiana legislators passed resolutions condemning
sanctions as antisemitic.

Members of Congress are attempting to attach a bill to a
trans-Atlantic trade deal to block European governments from requiring
the special labelling of goods produced in illegal Jewish settlements in
the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel is concerned that the EU
measure – which then foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman likened to the
Nazis forcing Jews to wear a yellow star – will add legitimacy to the
sanctions campaign.

The influential pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (Aipac) – whose $100m headquarters was paid for by
Adelson – is pushing the legislation which effectively forces the EU to
recognise the settlements as part of Israel for trade purposes.

Senator Ben Cardin, the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars
in campaign donations from pro-Israel groups, introduced the
legislation saying the European move is discrimination against the
Jewish state.

“The United States should take a stance to make sure other countries
that want trade agreements with the United States do not participate in
BDS against Israel,” he told an Aipac conference.

Jewish Voice for Peace, a US group which supports sanctions,
condemned the legislation for “encouraging illegal settlement building
while strengthening the far right in Israel”.

“From South Africa to the grape boycott to the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) tactics have been
essential tools used to create a more just society,” it said.

Although the focus is now on the BDS movement, the political battle
over the Middle East on US campuses has been going on for years.

The University of Illinois is facing a lawsuit for withdrawing the offer of an academic position to Steven Salaita over tweets critical of Israel. The university said the problem was not Salaita’s views but his “lack of civility”.

“It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees,” the site warns.

Conservative thinktank the Middle East Forum has targeted university
lecturers considered too critical of Israel by encouraging students to
report teachers, books and lectures they regarded as hostile to the
Jewish state. The forum runs a website, Campus Watch, which has been accused by academics of “McCarthyesque” intimidation.

James Gelvin, a University of California history professor on the
so-called “Dirty 30” list of “radical and antisemitic professors”, has
accused pro-Israel activists of “trying to shut down debate” and ensure
“one viewpoint is going to be presented on campus”.

…but that does not alter the fact that the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European — and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar — origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur “

This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry…

The Khazars’ sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain.

In the second part of this book, “The Heritage,” Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced. Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based “on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”

ArthurKoestler documents the Caucasian ancestry of Ashkenazim Jews.…TheThirteenthTribe. The Khazar Empire and its Heritage. ArthurKoestler. Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced. Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based “on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

The vast majority of Jews in the world is of Eastern European – and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar – origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, based on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. Maybe the two world wars and the Holocaust were pretext for the New Khazaria or Israel hoax.The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.(Arthur Koestler,The Thirteenth Tribe, p. 17).

Old Khazaria existed from about 500 A.D. to about 1000 A.D.

Old Khazaria adopted the religion of Talmudic Judaism about 740 A.D.

Khazaria was reborn on May 14, 1948.

The most cruel hoax which man has ever perpetrated.

As long as Apostate Israel (New Khazaria) exist…there will never be any peace in the Middle East. Modern-day Jewry is of Eastern European/Aryan descent and thus they are not Semitic. Let the truth be told everywhere. Why should American Soldiers die to protect a Hoax?

Millions expect Israel to play a major role in God’s future plan for earth. Could they all be wrong? Is there a conspiracy to deceive God’s people? What is the Biblical evidence concerning modern day Israel?

Many people today consider the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine to be a direct and dramatic fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a phenomenal best seller of the last few decades, and Jerry Jenkins and Tim Lahaye’s Lift Behind, along with Bishop T.D. Jakes declares that the end of the world will come within the lifetime of the generation that saw the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, hereby applying the words of Jesus: “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” (Matthew 24:34)

Coupled with this fascination with Israel is a novel teaching regarding the return of Jesus, called the “secret rapture.” These books and many other speaks for many today who expect God secretly to take the “church” to heaven prior to the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple on its old site where the sacred Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, now stands. According to this position, after the “church” is “raptured” to heaven, there will be seven years of the worst period of famine, bloodshed, and pestilence ever experienced by man. During this great tribulation the focus will be on God’s dealings with the Jews, who are again given the responsibility for the evangelization of the world.

According to secret-rapture preachers, the battle of Armageddon will climax the end of the seven-year tribulation as the nations of the earth take sides over the future of Israel. When mankind teeters on the brink of incinerating the world, Jesus will return gloriously and save man from self-extinction. At that time Jesus will set up a literal one-thousand-year reign on earth with Jerusalem functioning as the spiritual capital of the world.

Most evangelical periodicals and pulpits teach this view today, and to those who do not know better, it might appear that this prophetic scenario, known as pretribulationism, has been the traditional teaching of the Christian church since New Testament days. Nothing is further from the truth. Be not deceived.. Did the architects of the creation of modern day Israel have any thing to do with the development of the rapture theory? Where did the Rapture theology originate? Is the crisis in the Middle East and the war in the Iraq have anything to do with the erroneous rapture theory?

Is there a master conspiracy at work

According to dispensationalists John Hagee, Jack van Impe, Ken Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, John Walvoord, Grant Jefferies, Tim Lahaye, Benny Hinn, Clarence Larkin, H. Caldwell, TD Jakes and others who teach and preach about the Rapture, Israel has two dispensations, or time periods, in which they functions as God’s special instrument of salvation. Between these two periods of time comes the dispensation of the “church”. The church received a heavenly reward at the time of the rapture, while Israel received an earthly reward at the end of the tribulation.

There is no support in the New Testament for such an erroneous view.The chief reason why the modern state of Israel has no prophetic significance is that after the Jews as a body rejected Jesus as the Messiah, God gave to the Christian church the special privileges, responsibilities, and prerogatives once assigned to the ancient Jews. No longer were the Jews to be His special people with a prophetic destiny.Rom.2:28 For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; vs.29 but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God.All the promises of a glorious kingdom on earth once given through the Jewish prophets to the Jewish people became void because the Jewish people as a nation did not fulfill the conditions of these prophecies. Failing to receive the glory that could have been Israel’s is probably the saddest story in literature. Placed at the crossroads of the ancient world, God furnished them with every facility for becoming the greatest nation on the earth. God wanted to reward Israel with every physical and spiritual blessing as they put into practice the clear-cut principles that He had graciously taught them through His prophets (Deuteronomy 7, 8, 28).The Old Testament records the sad story of how the vineyard of Israel produced, not the mature fruit of a Christ-like character, but “wild grapes,” a misinterpretation and perversion of what the God of Israel was really like. “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” (Isaiah 5:4 RSV).

Even when the Jewish nation was suffering the bitter consequences of disobedience during the Babylonian captivity, God mercifully promised that a restored Israel was possible and that there was yet time to recover its special role as His representative on earth – if it would honor His law and submit to His principles. Even then the Jews could have become, if faithful, the head and not the tail, in matters physical and spiritual; all nations would have looked upon Jerusalem as not only the center of wisdom but also the spiritual capital of the world (see Isaiah 45:14; 60:1 – 11).When the Jews returned to Palestine after the Babylonian captivity, the promises given to Abraham and expanded through the writings of Moses and other prophets would have been fulfilled; the whole earth would have been alerted for the first advent of Christ, even as the way is being prepared for His second coming today.Missed Their Last Opportunity.These Old Testament prophecies that picture Israel dwelling in peace and prosperity, with all nations beating a path to her doors, could have been fulfilled 2000 years ago if they had indeed prepared the world for the first coming of Jesus (see Zechariah 8:14). But instead of fulfilling their greatest assignment they missed their last opportunity, and Jesus their Lord finally had to pronounce with irrevocable judgement: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not Behold your house is forsaken and desolate” (Matthew 23:37, 38 RSV).Those who regard the establishment of the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of those Old Testament prophecies overlook the fact that these promises were made either prior to their release from Babylonian captivity or during the rebuilding days soon after their return. God would have fulfilled these promises if Israel had been faithful and obedient to the conditions on which the promises were made.Although God promised a “second chance” to Israel after their failure leading up to the Babylonian captivity, He promised no “third chance” to them after their final rejection when their Lord Himself “came to his own home, and his own people received him not” (John 1:11 RSV)But God did not give up, even though Israel as a nation had failed Him. Although corporate Israel no longer was to function as God’s special agent, the individual Jews who received and obeyed Jesus Christ would constitute the new organization through which He would now work.Paul describes this remarkable transition in Romans 9 to 11, where he appeals to individual Jews (such as himself) to respond to God through Jesus, join those Gentiles who have found in Him the solution to their anxious, sinful condition, and together arouse the world to the simple fact that God wants to make an end to sin and its misery by setting up His eternal kingdom composed of those who have found in Jesus the promised Saviour.Those who preach and teach this erroneous Rapture doctrine are purposely misleading multitudes. This doctrine was created by the Jesuits as an anti-reformation and anti-protestant tool to divert attention away from the Catholic and the Pope whom the reformers had identify as the anti-Christ in Revelation. Those who teach and preach the rapture theory are proxies and agents for the Kabbalists and those who want to establish a New World Order (NWO). The Rapture theory has more to do with politics than theology, more to do with mans involvement in world affairs than Gods involvement, more about Zionism than the people of Zion.

Beloved above are false religious preachers, teachers and Theological Schools as well as publishing houses. Beware my friends and study to show yourself approve.

Luciferian Rapture Doctrine Books and Conferences –

Beware of False Preachers, Teachers and Bible Schools that
promote an Anti-Christ, Anti-protestant and Luciferian Rapture Doctrine –
Beware my Friend Beware – They are not of God, but wolves in Sheep
Clothing.

Jesuit
Priest Thomas is the Head of the False Prophet Society and is the
leading authority of the anti-christ, anti-protestant and Luciferian
Rapture Doctrine. Ice is leading millions of Christians down the road of
perdition.

It was once possible to argue that Israel’s policies were not the same as apartheid because their stated goal, however imperfectly pursued, was to end the occupation. After Netanyahu’s reelection, this is no longer the case.

In my quarter century as Washington correspondent for Jewish newspapers, I frequently defended Israel against charges that it had created an apartheid system in the West Bank. But this week’s election, with Benjamin Netanyahu poised to serve another term with an even more hardline coalition, means that apartheid is the path Israeli voters have chosen. The inevitable results will include even greater international isolation for the Jewish state, a boost to efforts to apply boycotts and sanctions, diminished support from American Jews and endlessly intensifying cycles of violence.

The idea of apartheid suggests the intent to make separation and unequal treatment permanent, and in the past it was possible to argue that for all the expansion of settlements, Israel was still looking for ways to end the occupation. No more. Frightened by the last minute rise of the Zionist Union list in polls, Netanyahu unambiguously expressed what critics have long asserted was his core ideology: no Palestinian state. No territorial concessions. None. Period. And Israel’s voters returned him to office, in what was widely reported as a resounding victory.

Bibi plays on the ignorance of the American people especially Dooms Day Apocalyptic Christian Believers. Rapture hoax preacher John Hagee is Bibi leading false preacher to promoting the erroneous doctrine Document from his own spy agency turns up and shows that his dark warnings about Iran don’t always match the facts known to Israeli intelligence.

The document in question is a 2012 memo from Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, updating its South African counterpart on the status of Iran’s nuclear project. It’s one of several hundred classified South African intelligence documents leaked to Al Jazeera and reported February 23 in Al Jazeera and the Guardian of London. What put the Mossad memo in the headlines is the fact that it’s dated October 22, 2012, barely three-and-a-half weeks after Netanyahu’s famous cartoon-bomb speech about Iran to the United

One of the stops Pope Francis made while at Mount Hertzl in Israel was at a panel with the names of 85 victims of an attack in Buenos Aires on a Jewish community center in 1994 (Victims of Acts of Terror Memorial). That attack, referred to as the AMIA bombing …. … was Argentina’s deadliest bombing ever. Argentina is home to a Jewish community of 200,000, the largest in Latin America and sixth in the world outside Israel …. Over the years, the case has been marked by incompetence and accusations of cover-ups …. In 2005, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would later become Pope Francis, was the first public personality to sign a petition for justice in the AMIA bombing case. He was one of the signatories on a document called “85 victims, 85 signatures” as part of the bombing’s 11th anniversary. And in 2010 … he visited the rebuilt AMIA building to talk with Jewish leaders. Some have opined a photo-op tug of war between Israelis and Palestinians, but given Francis’ history with the AMIA bombing case, it’s not surprising that he would want to visit this memorial. Similar AMIA Attacks by Zionist Terrorists was the King David Hotel -Beirut Marine Barracks – and 911-WTC

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/netanyahu–calls-for-jewish…CachedNetanyahucalls for Jewish massmigration to Israel … events in Paris on January 7-9.Israeli Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahu urged European Jews to move to

Hitlers Transfer Agreement also urged Jews to immigrate to Palestine. In 1933 Zionist Hitler and the Third Reich, transferred some 60,000 Jews and $100 million to Palestine. Later in 1939, Hitler the Holocaust (burnt offering) agenda forced surviving European Jews to immigrate to Palestine.

It is apparent that the Zionist want WW3. They are doing everything possible to usher in WW3. Muslim attacks on Christians and the Christians attacks on Muslim are all part of a orchestrated agenda by the Zionist elite to get Christian and Muslim countries to fight each other thus allowing the Zionist to reap te spoils. Is ISIS and Boka Haram and other so-called terrorist groups sponsor by the Zionist Elite?

If Hitler and the Zionists elite were willing to sacrifice six million of their own people in-order to get Palestine, what wouldn’t the Zionist elite do today to keep all of Palestine and force a Jewish migration.

In 1964, German Jewish author, Dietrich Bronder, documented the reason behind Nazi-Zionist collaboration in ‘Before Hitler Came‘ – their common Jewish Heritage of Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering, Dr. Josef Goebbels, Gregor Strasser, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsminister von Ribbentrop, SS Leader Reinhard Himmler, and Hitler’s bankers, Ritter von Strauss and von Stein. The Hitler regime agreed with Chaim Arlosoroff of the World Zionist Organization to let tens of thousands of German Jews to migrate with their wealth to British occupied Arab Palestine. This agreement is known as the Haavara (Hebrew for “transfer”). The Agreement allowed 60,000 German Jews to imigrate to Palestine and settle on Arab land during 1933-1941. The Zionist-controlled mainstream media doesn’t want the western people to know about the part the ‘World Zionist Organization (WZO)’ and the ‘American Jewish Council (AJC)’ played in the Nazi crimes against Gypsie, Christians and Jews. Both organizations were adamant that Jews emigrate nowhere else than Palestine. The Germans had tried to arrange emigration to Madagascar and Uganda but those possibilities were closed by Jewish organizations. What remained is a working relationship with the Zionist organizations Irgun and Haganah to facilitate emigration to Palestine. The British made this difficult. “The economic relationship with Germany was indispensable in the creation of the State of Israel. Without Germany and the Nazis, there would have been no “aliyah” to the Holy Land,” says Black.

Hitler’sethnicity was Jewish but he was raised Roman Catholic. It has always been the quest of the Catholic Church to reclaim Jerusalam

“Hitler would not have been happy,” said Professor Ronny Decorte in a Google translationof theKnack‘s web-version of the story. Decorte, a genetics expert from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (a Flemish research university), says that Hitler apparently wasn’t “Aryan” — what the Nazi would have considered “pure.

The story of Adolf Hitler could be the most twisted in all of history. Add one more twist.

Responsiblefor the slaughter of millions of Jews and a hero only to self-avowed racists, DNA tests apparently show that the Nazi dictator may have had Jewish and African ancestry.

Achromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews …

HaplogroupE1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18 to 20 per cent of Ashkenazi and 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population.

Hitler’s preoccupation with ancestry — including his own — has caused speculation for many years.New York Daily News points out that this research could validate a historic myth:

Hitler’s heritage has been called into question before, with some suggesting his grandfather was Salomon Mayer von Rothschild founder of the Jewish international banking dynasty. The Rothschild family financially backed Hitler’s

Hitler aunt Betty, the half-sister of Alois, father of Adolph was married toher uncle James Mayer de Rothschild and their son Edmond James Rothschild, the Father of Israel was Hitler’s first cousin.

But this is the first claim with any scientific data to support it.

Similarreports have been made against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and said the WWII was a pretext for the Zionist to getPalestineand make it a new Ashkenazi homeland.

An Austrian document was prepared that proved Maria Anna Schicklgruber was living in Vienna at the time she conceived. At that time she was employed as a servant in the home of Baron Rothschild. As soon as the family discovered her pregnancy she was sent back home… where Alois was born.”

Langer’s information came from the high level Gestapo officer, Hansjurgen Koehler, published in 1940, under the title “Inside the Gestapo“. He writes about the investigations into Hitler’s background carried out by the Austrian Chancellor, Dolfuss, in the family files of Hitler. The Rothschilds and the Illuminati produce many offspring out of wedlock in their secret breeding programs and these children are brought up under other names with other parents. Like Bill Clinton, who is almost certainly the son of Winthrop Rockefeller produced in the same way, these “ordinary kids from ordinary backgrounds” go on to be extraordinarily successful in their chosen field. Hitler, too, would have produced unofficial children to maintain his strand of the bloodline and there will obviously be people of his bloodline alive today. So which Rothschild was the grandfather of Hitler? My thanks to a website correspondent for the additional, updated, information to this article, a man has researched this story in some detail. Alois, Hitler’s father, was born in 1837 in the period when Salomon Mayer was the only Rothschild who lived at the Vienna mansion. Even his wife did not live there because their marriage was so bad that she stayed in Frankfurt. Their son, Anselm Salomon spent most of his working life in Paris and Frankfurt away from Vienna and his father. Father Salomon Mayer, living alone at the Vienna mansion where Hitler’s grandmother worked, is the prime, most obvious candidate. And Hermann von Goldschmidt, the son of Salomon Mayer’s senior clerk, wrote a book, published in 1917, which said of Salomon:

“…by the 1840s he had developed a somewhat reckless enthusiasm for young girls..” and“He had a lecherous passion for very young girls, his adventures with whom had to be hushed up by the police.”

And Hitler’s grandmother, a young girl working under the same roof would not have been the subject of Salomon’s desire?And this same girl became pregnant while working there? And her grandson becomes the Chancellor of Germany, funded by the Rothschilds, and he started the Second World War which was so vital to the Rothschild-Illuminati agenda? And the Illuminati are obsessed with putting their bloodlines into power on all “sides” in a conflict?

‘Mein Kampf written by Jesuit Father Staempfle

TheFuhrer had come to power, thanks to the votes of the Catholic Zentrum, only five years before, but most of the objectives cynically revealed in ‘Mein Kampf were already realized; this book, an insolent challenge to the western democracies, was written by the Jesuit Father Staempfle and signed by Hitler. For—as so many ignore the fact—it was the Society of Jesus which perfected the famous Pan-German programme as laid out in this book, and the Fuhrer endorsed it. The Secret History of the Jesu

German Elite in Vatican

(Click Book to Read Online)

Pope Benedict XVI

Current Pope when he was in Hitler Youth

His father, Joseph Ratzinger, Sr.,was an Ordnungspolizei. The Ordnungspolizei (OrPo) was the name for the uniformed regular German police force that existed in Nazi Germany between the years of 1936 and 1945. After their green uniforms, they were also referred to as Grüne Polizei (green police).

For many Ashkenazi Jews, the Holocaust was the darkest event in theirhistory. The average Jews lost family members, friends, love ones but forthe Jewish elite and the practitioners of Kabbalah, the Holocaust(applying the Machiavellian principle the end justify the means ) was ameans to an end.

The elite can say that the sacrifice of millions of Jews during theHolocaust was the means for the creation of a Zionist state. If therewas no Holocaust, there would be no Israel. The Holocaust was anecessary event for the dreams and agenda of the Zionists to be fullyrealize.

If I was Jewish and lost love ones during the holocaust, and the holocaust turn out to be by design by the elite Jewish Zionist, I would use all of my resources and doing everything in my power to make the elite paid for their betrayal of their own people. Can one justify the sacrifice of millions of Jews for the pseudo land of Israel? Does the end justify the means.

Luciferian Books and conference that promote the Luciferian Rapture Doctrine

Thomas Ice Head of the Pretrib-Luciferian Rapture

Beware of Books and Videos by false Religious Teachers and Preachers who promote war with Muslim vs. Christians

What Netanyahu is really saying when he said Mission Accomplished

I can imagine what Netanyahu is really saying when he said mission accomplish. Listen to his thoughts –

“I was able to kill or wound thousandsof girls and mothers who were giving birth to terrorist and I was able to kill or wound thousands of boys who was going to become terrorist.

I also was able to displace or remove one million people from the oil/gas rich Levantine basin and pave the way for Rothschild/Israel oil to start off shore drilling for natural gas. (The basin is value $6 billion and owned by Palestine)

I successfully terrorized 2 million Gazans and left the survivors traumatized.

Mission accomplish.

Now I must get the American goyim tax payers to re-supply my killing arsenal. I also want to re-supply Hamas with non-lethal rockets (Chinese fireworks) as pretext for my next operation.

The American goyim must not ever second guess me again.

American Zionist politicians and tax payers are stupid goyim fools that I can manipulate at my will.”Yours Truly

With or without an infusion of massive amounts of international aid, clearing away the mess of this war will take years. Streets can be cleaned, but the wounds, both physical and mental, will not soon heal, nor will the survivors easily erase the feelings of helplessness, despair and anger with which they have been left.

Israel attack on Gaza is another chapter in the Illuminati design for World War III.

Albert Pike said “The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion…We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.”

Former President Jimmy Carter once again is getting way out in front of the U.S. government on the Middle East, co-authoring an op-ed in which he calls for Washington to recognize designated terror group Hamas as a legitimate “political actor” — while blasting Israel for its military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The scathing column on ForeignPolicy.com was written by Carter and Ireland’s former president Mary Robinson. The article called the current conflict a “humanitarian catastrophe,” and while acknowledging Hamas’ “indiscriminate targeting” of Israelis, focused its criticism on Israel. “There is no humane or legal justification for the way the Israeli Defense Forces are conducting this war,” they wrote. “Israeli bombs, missiles, and artillery have pulverized large parts of Gaza, including thousands of homes, schools, and hospitals.” They said “deliberate attacks on civilians” constitute “war crimes” on both sides, though noting far fewer Israelis have been killed in the fighting. “The international community’s initial goal should be the full restoration of the free movement of people and goods to and from Gaza through Israel, Egypt and the sea. Concurrently, the United States and EU should recognize that Hamas is not just a military but also a political force,” Carter and Robinson wrote. “Hamas cannot be wished away, nor will it cooperate in its own demise. Only by recognizing its legitimacy as a political actor — one that represents a substantial portion of the Palestinian people — can the West begin to provide the right incentives for Hamas to lay down its weapons.”

Israel’s utterly immoral and despicable one-sided devastation of Gaza, which cannot really even be called a “war” but aggression that is taking on the dimensions of a pogrom, now includes an attack on Gaza’s power plant. Other sources of power having been damaged already, this leaves Gaza without power or largely without power. This directly affects water, sanitation systems, sewage systems and hospitals, and may lead to deaths from disease. Palestinians have no escape route from Gaza. Vast numbers of Palestinians are now displaced refugees in a very small area, and Israel has caused this result intentionally.

A flimsy rationale has appeared: “Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, did not comment on the explosion at the plant, but told The Associated Press that Israel’s latest strikes signal ‘a gradual increase in the pressure’ on Hamas.”

Israel brought on the rocket attacks that it has used as a pretext for launching a full-scale invasion that is out of all reasonable proportion to the initial triggering events, the pretext, and the Hamas response. For an account of that, see here.

The European Union has to cancel its trade agreements with the regime of gangsters in Israel. This is the view from the president of the political left in Sweden, Lars Ohly. The President of Venstrepartiet used words as «regime of gangsters» when he spoke about the state of Israel, and demanded that the European union take action against what he called extremists in the Israeli government.The Government of Benjamin Netayahu is building illegal Jewish settlements. Israel evicts Palestinians, latest in Jerusalem, and is a tragic copy of the Apartheid regime in South Africa

Alois (Rothschild) Hitler (1837-1903).

Was Hitler a Rothschild? Who was giving Hilter his orders?

Hitler’s ethnicity was Jewish but he was raised Roman Catholic. It has always been the quest of the Catholic Church to reclaim Jerusalam

“Hitler would not have been happy,” said Professor Ronny Decorte in a Google translationof theKnack‘s web-version of the story. Decorte, a genetics expert from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (a Flemish research university), says that Hitler apparently wasn’t “Aryan” — what the Nazi would have considered “pure.

The story of Adolf Hitler could be the most twisted in all of history. Add one more twist.

Responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews and a hero only to self-avowed racists, DNA tests apparently show that the Nazi dictator may have had Jewish and African ancestry.

A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews …

Haplogroup E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18 to 20 per cent of Ashkenazi and 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population.

Hitler’s preoccupation with ancestry — including his own — has caused speculation for many years.New York Daily News points out that this research could validate a historic myth:

Hitler’s heritage has been called into question before, with some suggesting his grandfather was SalomonMayer von Rothschildfounder of the Jewish international banking dynasty. The Rothschild family financially backed Hitler’s

Hitler’s aunt Betty, was married to James Mayer de Rothschild and their son Edmond James Rothschild, the Father of Israel was Hitler’s first cousin.

Betty was daughter of Salomon Rothschild and the sister to Alois, father of Adolph Hitler. But this is the first claim with any scientific data to support it.

Similar reports have been made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and said the WWII was a pretext for the Zionist to get Palestine and make it a new Ashkenazi homeland.

An Austrian document was prepared that proved Maria Anna Schicklgruber was living in Vienna at the time she conceived. At that time she was employed as a servant in the home of Baron Rothschild. As soon as the family discovered her pregnancy she was sent back home… where Alois was born.”

Langer’s information came from the high level Gestapo officer, Hansjurgen Koehler, published in 1940, under the title “Inside the Gestapo“. He writes about the investigations into Hitler’s background carried out by the Austrian Chancellor, Dolfuss, in the family files of Hitler.The Rothschilds and the Illuminati produce many offspring out of wedlock in their secret breeding programs and these children are brought up under other names with other parents.Like Bill Clinton, who is almost certainly the son of Winthrop Rockefeller produced in the same way, these “ordinary kids from ordinary backgrounds” go on to be extraordinarily successful in their chosen field. Hitler, too, would have produced unofficial children to maintain his strand of the bloodline and there will obviously be people of his bloodline alive today.So which Rothschild was the grandfather of Hitler? My thanks to a website correspondent for the additional, updated, information to this article, a man has researched this story in some detail. Alois, Hitler’s father, was born in 1837 in the period when Salomon Mayer was the only Rothschild who lived at the Vienna mansion. Even his wife did not live there because their marriage was so bad that she stayed in Frankfurt. Their son, Anselm Salomon spent most of his working life in Paris and Frankfurt away from Vienna and his father.Father Salomon Mayer, living alone at the Vienna mansion where Hitler’s grandmother worked, is the prime, most obvious candidate. And Hermann von Goldschmidt, the son of Salomon Mayer’s senior clerk, wrote a book, published in 1917, which said of Salomon:

“…by the 1840s he had developed a somewhat reckless enthusiasm for young girls..” and“He had a lecherous passion for very young girls, his adventures with whom had to be hushed up by the police.”

And Hitler’s grandmother, a young girl working under the same roof would not have been the subject of Salomon’s desire?And this same girl became pregnant while working there? And her grandson becomes the Chancellor of Germany, funded by the Rothschilds, and he started the Second World War which was so vital to the Rothschild-Illuminati agenda? And the Illuminati are obsessed with putting their bloodlines into power on all “sides” in a conflict?

The Hebrew noun olah (עֹלָה) occurs 289 times in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible. It means “that which goes up [in smoke]”.[2] It is formed from the active participle of the Hiphil form of the verb alah (עָלָה), “to cause to ascend.” It was sometimes also called kalil, an associated word found in Leviticus, meaning “entire”.[2][3] Its traditional name in English is “holocaust“,[2] and the word olah has traditionally been translated as “burnt offering.”[3][4][5] The term was translated as holocauston in the Septuagint. Today, some English Bible translations render the word as holocaust, and others translate it as “burnt offering”.

Were the millions of Ashkenazi Jews killed in WW2 a burnt offering (sacrifice) by the Jewish elite in order to secure world sympathy for the establishment of Israel? Ends justify the means.

Holocaust definition, a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially … a sacrifice completely consumed by fire; burnt offering. … “Auschwitz makes all too clear the principle that the human psyche can create meaning out of anything

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Dan Williams GAZA/JERUSALEM, July 28 (Reuters) – Israel sees no need for another Gaza ceasefire, an Israeli official was quoted as saying on Monday, as tensions between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Washington flared over U.S. mediation to end the almost three-week-old war. Fighting had subsided over the weekend, with the battered Palestinian enclave’s dominant Hamas Islamists endorsing a U.N. call for a 24-hour halt ahead of Monday’s Eid al-Fitr festival. Yet Israel balked, having abandoned its own offer to extend a 12-hour truce from Saturday as Palestinian rocket launches persisted. Netanyahu’s security cabinet met into the early hours of Monday to debate proposals including for an escalation of the Gaza offensive in which almost 1,100 people have died. Israeli air, sea and ground attacks have killed some 1,131 Palestinians, mainly civilians and including many children, Gaza officials say. Israel says 43 of its soldiers have died, along with three civilians killed by rocket and mortar fire from Gaza. GAZA/JERUSALEM, July 26 (Reuters) – Israel will extend a humanitarian truce in the Gaza Strip by a further four hours, a government source said on Saturday, as the number of Palestinian deaths in the 19-day war topped 1,000. Great Britain Labour leader Ed Miliband Call Israel’s Attack on Gaza Barbarism

He continued: “The tragedy yesterday at the UN school is a horrific example of what we feared: the death, destruction and mayhem resulting from the escalation of violence. This is a cycle of violence that has spiralled out of control.” He warned: “Hundreds have died, the great majority innocent civilians. And with every hour the casualties rise. The international community must be allowed immediate access to provide medical assistance to the wounded and in the longer term reconstruction of destroyed homes, hospitals, schools and infrastructure. Were the world’s attention not overwhelmingly fixed on the fate of Flight MH17, it would have more to say about that of the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza. Bombed and battered by Israeli air and firepower, they are dying in scores, victims alike of their own leadership and Israeli ruthlessness. Some of the dead are Hamas fighters. But many others are women, children, the helpless old. Israel is exacting vengeance at its usual tariff for Hamas rocketing, and the murder of three Israeli students by terrorists. For each Israeli killed, the lives of many times that number of Palestinians are forfeit.Israel says: they started it; we have a right to retribution. But much of the world says: the Jewish people have been historic standard-bearers for civilisation. Does Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign in Gaza represent that — or instead barbarism? Israel’s tragedy is that the only democracy in the Middle East has fallen prey to a succession of right-wing governments, which derive much of their electoral strength from Russian emigres and extremist religious parties. A historian friend, himself a Jew and an uncommonly astute observer of the world, said to me a while back: ‘Consciously or unconsciously, Israel has decided that it prefers a state of permanent war to making the concessions to the Palestinians that would be indispensable to any chance of peace.’

The mass casualties in the Shejaia district in northeast Gaza were the heaviest since Israel launched its offensive on the Palestinian territory on July 8 after cross-border rocket strikes by militants intensified.

The fiercest fighting of the 13-day war in Gaza erupted on Sunday morning as Israel dramatically widened its ground offensive, sending tanks and troops into urban areas and causing thousands of panicked civilians to flee.

Images of the corpses of women and children were posted on Facebook as hospitals were overwhelmed with the dead, injured and those seeking sanctuary from the onslaught.Since the start of Israel-Hamas fighting almost two weeks ago, 505 Palestinians have been killed and 3350 wounded in Israeli air and artillery strikes, according to Palestinian health officials. A quarter of the deaths were reported since the start of the ground offensive late. It said that since July 8, Israeli IDF attacked 2,570 targets, including hospitals and cemeteries describing them as “terror sites”.

Israel invades Gaza because it can. Gazans, in the face of an invasion, have no ability to strike back, while Israel strikes forward. Israel has total military superiority, an air force which can knock and then bomb, a navy which can shell Gazans from miles off shore, an army which can roll tanks into Gaza nonstop. Gazans have no army, navy, or air force with which to defend. Israel, as any nation, has a right to defend itself, but it confuses offense with defense. It is on the offensive in Gaza. Israel, with its overwhelming military strength, is attacking and invading Gaza in violation of international and U.S. law. Its construction of settlements violates the Oslo agreement. Its Central Bank dries up the Gaza economy and blocks payments to Gazan civil servants. Its total control brings the Palestinians to utter subjection and total despair. Israel can kill, injure, and humiliate Palestinians at will, with impunity, which is exactly what gave rise to Hamas and strengthens Hamas’ hold in Gaza, even as the IDF advances. Israel will go door to door in Gaza in the hunt for Hamas, which comprises the government of the Palestinians and is therefore a necessary party to any peace talks. It is axiomatic that if you kill your partner for peace, you will have no partner for peace. There will be no peace, for now, as Gaza is turned into an abattoir, to collectively punish Gazans for supporting Hamas. Israel, in its attempt to divide Hamas from the Gazans, will actually multiply Hamas’ strength in Gaza and elsewhere. Israel may indeed find and kill Hamas officials. But it is not the current individuals who make up Hamas who constitute Israel’s deep dilemma, which threatens its long term security. It is Israel’s policies which gave rise to Hamas and which, if left unaltered, will spawn increased resistance no matter how many members of Hamas Israel is successful in apprehending or killing. What is the end game? To cast Gazans to the sea, where they will be met by the Israeli Navy? To push Gazans into Egypt? To eject all Palestinians to… where? This is a question relevant not only to Israelis and Palestinians, but to the entire world. There will be consequences for this invasion. The cycle of violence will widen. It will draw in friends of the Palestinians and it will affect Israel’s allies. In the U.S., as our great friend presses the attack in Gaza, there will be increasing questions among the American people as to whether the $3 billion we give Israel annually is being used to defend our ally, or whether it is buying the U.S. billions of dollars worth of problems because of the manner in which our friend “defends” itself. Since the U.S. is helping to pay Israel’s bills, we cannot avoid the consequences of paying the price for Israel’s actions against the Palestinians.

Gaza is OBAMA TEST as Diplomatic leaderBiden is correct, some foreign leader is going to try the steel of Obama, but which foreign leader will it be? Will it be Russia, Iran, China, or North Korea? None of the above. It will be Israel. The forces of evil have already raised its ugly head. What Obama wanted to do with world diplomacy, re-establishing the credibility of the US especially in the Muslim world, Israel is making that extremely difficult. President Bush has already blamed the victims (Gaza) and justified the perpetrators (Israel) for the violence in Gaza. That is the same as a woman being brutally rape and the judge arrest the woman and blames her for allowing the rapist to rape her. The people of Gaza are being killed with American made and American donated F-16 fighter jets, GPS-guided GBU-39 smart bombs, and Tanks. Why is it that every time Israel raid Gaza, Ramallah, Hebron, or Lebanon , the United States that pays? What was Israel doing at 911? They were in Ramallah doing the same thing that they are doing in Gaza now. It was the unbalance America foreign policy in the Middle East that caused 911 and led the US into the Iraq war. According to Bush advisor Philip Zelikow “the IRAQ war was launched to protect Israel.” The only problem is that Americans are giving their lives and Israel politicians are laughing all the way to the bank. This unbalance policy has also caused the US to lose its credibility and positive standing in the World as well as thousands of lives. Is America going to allow Israeli politicians and American Zionist Lobbyists to continue to put the American people in harms way? Yes, Muslims worldwide will continue to say “no justice no peace” Christians worldwide should also cry out and condemn the actions of Israel. When will the US foreign policy in the Middle East be fair and balance? When are the American politicians going to say enough is enough? Will Obama be fair and balance? Or will Obama be controlled by AIPAC and the Jewish lobby?

Shot down or blown up with a bomb or whatever, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 has all the fingerprints of a false flag. Maybe a multifaceted one including a diversion from Israel’s ground invasion into Gaza.

We may get distracted but we’re not being fooled. Very little the controlled media will tell us about the downed flight will be even close to the truth but they are working overtime to convince us. Israel Invades Gaza

Initially I assumed Israel would time their ground invasion portion of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza to coincide with the Final match of the World Cup. It appears the apartheid, rogue, nuclear armed, terror State has instead chose to step up aggression under the cover of the shoot down of a Malaysia Airlines 777 over the Ukraine. Whether the shoot down was a false flag to be blamed on Russia in order to push us ever closer to another Rothschild bankster World War remains to be seen; But the timing seems rather convenient for the Zionist regime.

pennyforyourthoughts2.blogspot.com/…/breaking-malaysian-passenger-… 11 hours ago – If Russia won’t take the Ukrainian bait would a false flag be the next move? …. To me it appears they are editing data to show the plane was flying … That’s Schiphol airport, a MOSSAD hotspot for intrigue, drug running, ….. Am I seeing a fake plane crash blown up in the air with already dead passengers?

OTTAWA – The Palestinian delegation in Ottawa has asked the Harper government to talk Israel out of its land invasion of Gaza. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird instead blamed Hamas for the latest escalation in the area and urged Egypt to broker a new ceasefire. The Palestinian statement was issued hours after Israel launched its first major offensive into Gaza in five years, following 10 days of airstrikes aimed at stopping the militant group Hamas from firing rockets at Israeli cities. “For the past 11 days the world has stood by as the Palestinians of Gaza have been subjected to indiscriminate killings and collective punishment,” the statement said. “We call on the government of Canada to talk Israel back from the brink of this disaster.” The statement stressed that the Israeli ground offensive will only compound the suffering of Palestinian civilians, children in particular, saying they account for 30 per cent of the 245 people killed so far. – See more at: http://www.timescolonist.com/palestinians-urge-ottawa-to-press-israel-to-stop-gaza-attack-baird-blames-hamas-1.1211586#sthash.DjT0U7CX.dpuf

Shot down or blown up with a bomb or whatever, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 has all the fingerprints of a false flag. Maybe a multifaceted one including a diversion from Israel’s ground invasion into Gaza.

We may get distracted but we’re not being fooled. Very little the controlled media will tell us about the downed flight will be even close to the truth but they are working overtime to convince us.

Initially I assumed Israel would time their ground invasion portion of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza to coincide with the Final match of the World Cup. It appears the apartheid, rogue, nuclear armed, terror State has instead chose to step up aggression under the cover of the shoot down of a Malaysia Airlines 777 over the Ukraine. Whether the shoot down was a false flag to be blamed on Russia in order to push us ever closer to another Rothschild bankster World War remains to be seen; But the timing seems rather convenient for the Zionist regime.

Link to video: Buildings blaze as Gaza comes under fire by Israel for third day The death toll in Gaza continued to rise on Thursday as Israel‘s strikes against Hamas intensified, while residents in Tel Aviv awoke to explosions as rockets were shot down over the city by the Iron Dome defence system. Reports claimed that eight members of the same family – including five children – were killed in an air strike on two homes in Khan Younis, south of Gaza. A spokesman for the Gazan health ministry told Palestinian media that no warning was given and that most of the dead were children. Ashraf al-Qidra said the total number of Palestinians killed over the past three days now stands at 77, with over 500 people injured in the tiny coastal strip. There have been no Israeli casualties from the hundreds of rockets that have been fired by militants in Gaza. There are also claims that a missile was fired at a cafe in Khan Younis late on Wednesday night, where dozens were gathered to watch the World Cup game between Argentina and Holland – with six dead and 15 injured, according to AFP. The Israeli defence forces said in a statement that it had targeted hundreds of sites in Gaza and killed three Islamic Jihad militants. “We aimed at 322 targets in Gaza overnight, taking to 750 the total number of Hamas targets hit by the army since the start of Operation Protective Edge,” Lt Col Peter Lerner told reporters. The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has refrained from launching a ground offensive on the strip, which was expected after tens of thousands of reserve soldiers were called up earlier this week. But he has defended the IDF’s actions in Gaza despite significant civilian casualties. Palestinian children inspect damage from Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Yasser Qudih/NurPhoto/Corbis In a statement on Wednesday, he said: “Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza are firing rockets on cities throughout the state of Israel – on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Beer Sheba, Sderot and other cities in Israel. No country on earth would remain passive in the face of hundreds of rockets fired on its cities and Israel is no exception.” He appeared to acknowledge the civilian casualties but claimed that the deaths were due to Hamas using Gazans as human shields, rather than the indiscriminate Israeli bombardment claimed by those in Gaza. “(Hamas) embeds its terrorists in hospitals, schools, mosques and apartment buildings throughout the Gaza Strip. Hamas is thus committing a double war crime: it targets Israeli civilians, while hiding behind Palestinian civilians,” he said. But international pressure is mounting as the death toll rises. The UN security council is due to hold an emergency meeting on the crisis. The secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, said on Wednesday that “Gaza is on a knife-edge” as he urged Israeli restraint, as well as a halt to rocket fire from Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. “The deteriorating situation is leading to a downward spiral which could quickly get beyond anyone’s control. The risk of violence expanding further still is real. Gaza, and the region as a whole, cannot afford another full-blown war.” Many have been surprised by both the quality and quantity of Hamas rockets, which have been shot down as far north as Hadera, more than 100km from Gaza. In Jerusalem, the city council has opened hundreds of bomb shelters across the city, after four rockets were intercepted over the city on Tuesday night. But many have remained unused for years. Following tweets to the mayor’s account identifying locked shelters, the city council has used the information to send out teams to improve them.

Israel’s intense bombardment of the Gaza Strip has killed at least 27 people and wounded 130 others, Palestinian officials have said. Israel on Tuesday said it was ready for a long-term offensive against Hamas in the Palestinian territory after a surge in rocket attacks on Israeli towns. “We are preparing for a battle against Hamas which will not end within a few days,” Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said in a statement. Israeli said it had undertaken more than 273 airstrikes against the strip on Tuesday. The Israeli cabinet has authorised the calling up of 40,000 army reservists ahead of a possible ground offensive. At least 1,500 soldiers have already been deployed around the perimeter of Gaza.

Thousands expect Israel to play a major role in God’s future plan for earth. What is the Biblical evidence?

Many people today consider the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine to be a direct and dramatic fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a phenomenal best seller of the last few decades, and Jerry Jenkins and Tim Lahaye’s Lift Behind, along with Bishop T.D. Jakes declares that the end of the world will come within the lifetime of the generation that saw the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, hereby applying the words of Jesus: “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” (Matthew 24:34) Coupled with this fascination with Israel is a novel teaching regarding the return of Jesus, called the “secret rapture.” These books and many other speaks for many today who expect God secretly to take the “church” to heaven prior to the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple on its old site where the sacred Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, now stands. According to this position, after the “church” is “raptured” to heaven, there will be seven years of the worst period of famine, bloodshed, and pestilence ever experienced by man. During this great tribulation the focus will be on God’s dealings with the Jews, who are again given the responsibility for the evangelization of the world. According to secret-rapture preachers, the battle of Armageddon will climax the end of the seven-year tribulation as the nations of the earth take sides over the future of Israel. When mankind teeters on the brink of incinerating the world, Jesus will return gloriously and save man from self-extinction. At that time Jesus will set up a literal one-thousand-year reign on earth with Jerusalem functioning as the spiritual capital of the world. Most evangelical periodicals and pulpits teach this view today, and to those who do not know better, it might appear that this prophetic scenario, known as pretribulationism, has been the traditional teaching of the Christian church since New Testament days. Nothing is further from the truth. Be not deceived.. Did the architects of the creation of modern day Israel have any thing to do with the development of the rapture theory? Where did the Rapture theology originate? Is the crisis in the Middle East and the war in the Iraq have anything to do with the erroneous rapture theory? Is there a master conspiracy at work According to dispensationalists John Hagee, Jack van Impe, Ken Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, John Walvoord, Grant Jefferies, Tim Lahaye, Benny Hinn, Clarence Larkin, H. Caldwell, TD Jakes and others who teach and preach about the Rapture, Israel has two dispensations, or time periods, in which they functions as God’s special instrument of salvation. Between these two periods of time comes the dispensation of the “church”. The church received a heavenly reward at the time of the rapture, while Israel received an earthly reward at the end of the tribulation. There is no support in the New Testament for such an erroneous view. The chief reason why the modern state of Israel has no prophetic significance is that after the Jews as a body rejected Jesus as the Messiah, God gave to the Christian church the special privileges, responsibilities, and prerogatives once assigned to the ancient Jews. No longer were the Jews to be His special people with a prophetic destiny. Rom.2:28 For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; vs.29 but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God. All the promises of a glorious kingdom on earth once given through the Jewish prophets to the Jewish people became void because the Jewish people as a nation did not fulfill the conditions of these prophecies. Failing to receive the glory that could have been Israel’s is probably the saddest story in literature. Placed at the crossroads of the ancient world, God furnished them with every facility for becoming the greatest nation on the earth. God wanted to reward Israel with every physical and spiritual blessing as they put into practice the clear-cut principles that He had graciously taught them through His prophets (Deuteronomy 7, 8, 28). The Old Testament records the sad story of how the vineyard of Israel produced, not the mature fruit of a Christ-like character, but “wild grapes,” a misinterpretation and perversion of what the God of Israel was really like. “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” (Isaiah 5:4 RSV). Even when the Jewish nation was suffering the bitter consequences of disobedience during the Babylonian captivity, God mercifully promised that a restored Israel was possible and that there was yet time to recover its special role as His representative on earth – if it would honor His law and submit to His principles. Even then the Jews could have become, if faithful, the head and not the tail, in matters physical and spiritual; all nations would have looked upon Jerusalem as not only the center of wisdom but also the spiritual capital of the world (see Isaiah 45:14; 60:1 – 11). When the Jews returned to Palestine after the Babylonian captivity, the promises given to Abraham and expanded through the writings of Moses and other prophets would have been fulfilled; the whole earth would have been alerted for the first advent of Christ, even as the way is being prepared for His second coming today. Missed Their Last Opportunity. These Old Testament prophecies that picture Israel dwelling in peace and prosperity, with all nations beating a path to her doors, could have been fulfilled 2000 years ago if they had indeed prepared the world for the first coming of Jesus (see Zechariah 8:14). But instead of fulfilling their greatest assignment they missed their last opportunity, and Jesus their Lord finally had to pronounce with irrevocable judgement: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not Behold your house is forsaken and desolate” (Matthew 23:37, 38 RSV). Those who regard the establishment of the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of those Old Testament prophecies overlook the fact that these promises were made either prior to their release from Babylonian captivity or during the rebuilding days soon after their return. God would have fulfilled these promises if Israel had been faithful and obedient to the conditions on which the promises were made. Although God promised a “second chance” to Israel after their failure leading up to the Babylonian captivity, He promised no “third chance” to them after their final rejection when their Lord Himself “came to his own home, and his own people received him not” (John 1:11 RSV) But God did not give up, even though Israel as a nation had failed Him. Although corporate Israel no longer was to function as God’s special agent, the individual Jews who received and obeyed Jesus Christ would constitute the new organization through which He would now work. Paul describes this remarkable transition in Romans 9 to 11, where he appeals to individual Jews (such as himself) to respond to God through Jesus, join those Gentiles who have found in Him the solution to their anxious, sinful condition, and together arouse the world to the simple fact that God wants to make an end to sin and its misery by setting up His eternal kingdom composed of those who have found in Jesus the promised Saviour. Those who preach and teach this erroneous Rapture doctrine are purposely misleading multitudes. This doctrine was created by the Jesuits as an anti-reformation and anti-protestant tool to divert attention away from the Catholic and the Pope whom the reformers had identify as the anti-Christ in Revelation. Those who teach and preach the rapture theory are proxies and agents for the Kabbalists and those who want to establish a New World Order (NWO). The Rapture theory has more to do with politics than theology, more to do with mans involvement in world affairs than Gods involvement, more about Zionism than the people of Zion. I will discuss this later. New Khazaria:

2 days ago – Albert Pike’s Satanic World War 3 Plan “The Third World War ….. New Genetic Research Confirms Koestler’s “Khazar” Theory! Ashkenazi Jews …. The Hidden History of Jewish Bolshevism & Freemasonry! How Masonic Wall

Published on Oct 9, 2013 Thousands of Islamic extremists living in the UK could attack ‘at will’ – that’s the warning from the country’s security chief. Sharing his fears in his first speech since taking over MI5, Andrew Parker also admitted that UK intelligence services were ‘not perfect’.–

The MI5/6, CIA, NSA, Mossad … are all western Illuminist intelligence agencies. The people at the top echelons are Illuminists ie. Satanists! As part of the Satanic World War 3 plan (read below) they intend to foment violence, terrorism throughout the world. The Satanic scumbags behind all the terrorism are the western Illuminist intelligence agencies. Don’t be taken for a ride. Snakes tell sheeple their version of the ’truth’ so as to make themselves appear as good guys, saviors of the world … ! Emphasis and comments mine:-

Albert Pike’s Satanic World War 3 Plan“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion… – We shall unleash the Nihilists (ie. terrorists see definition below) and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil.– Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.” 4 –

Nihilism– A diffuse, revolutionary movement of mid 19th-century Russia that scorned authority and tradition and believed in reason, materialism, and radical change in society and government through terrorism and assassination.

“In 2001, Dr. Ariella Oppenheim, of Hebrew University, a biologist, published the first extensive study of DNA and the origin of the Jews. Her research found that virtually all the Jews came from Khazar blood. Not only that but Oppenheim discovered that the Palestinians—the very people whom the Jews had been persecuting and ejecting from Israel’s land since 1948—had more Israelite blood than did the Jews.In sum, the vast majority of the Jews were not Jews; some of the Palestinians were. Some of the Palestinians even had a DNA chromosome which established that they were “Cohens”—workers at the ancient Temple and synagogues of the Jews.” – Quote

Mr. Benjamin Freedman, a Jewish industrialist born in New York, wrote in the Economic Council Letter published there of October 15 1947: “These Eastern European Jews have neither a racial nor a historic connection with Palestine. Their ancestors were not inhabitants of the Promised Land. They are the direct descendants of the people of the Khazar Kingdom. The Khazars were a non-Semitic, Turko-Mongolian tribe.” Mr. Freedman was challenged, unwisely, by a Zionist objector; he invited his challenger to go with him to the Jewish room of the New York Public Library. There they could together examine the Jewish Encyclopedia volume I pp. 1-12, and the published works of Graetz, Dubnow, Friedlander, Raisin and many other noted Jewish historians, which, as well as other non-Jewish authorities, “establish the fact beyond all possible doubt”.’ ~ Somewhere South of Suez (1950) pp349-350.” –

Assassination Conspiracy Trial

Reprint from the King Center:

After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in
Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on
December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. In a
press statement held the following day in Atlanta, Mrs. Coretta Scott
King welcomed the verdict, saying , “There is abundant evidence of a
major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin
Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated
our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel
that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict
is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for
America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know
that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury
deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence
that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the
conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies,
were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also
affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James
Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.
I want to make it clear that my family has no interest in retribution.
Instead, our sole concern has been that the full truth of the
assassination has been revealed and adjudicated in a court of law… My
husband once said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends
toward justice.” To-day, almost 32 years after my husband and the father
of my four children was assassinated, I feel that the jury’s verdict
clearly affirms this principle. With this faith, we can begin the 21st
century and the new millennium with a new spirit of hope and healing.”

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed by James Earl Ray at the …His death shocked a country rocked by riots, civil discord, and a controversial war. … Defender newspaper, which features the headline ‘King Murdered!

11 hours ago – The fascinating, historical footage shows James Earl Ray (pictured) being handled by police officers in Tennessee after being extradited from .

MLK Memorial: Remembering the Dream

Martin Luther King is rightly remembered for his dream, first articulated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 48 years ago this Sunday, that the principles embodied in “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” would one day be vindicated and applied to all men, regardless of “the color of their skin.” Fewer remember that in the ensuing years before his untimely death in 1968, King gradually abandoned the dream of equal rights and sought instead “the realization of equality” through government redistribution of wealth.

How fitting, then, that the new Martin Luther King Memorial, unveiled Monday on the National Mall in Washington, DC, should stand between the Lincoln and FDR memorials—the former a tribute to the greatest champion of the Founders’ vision of equality, the latter a monument to the President who redefined rights and expanded the reach of government like no one else.

The King Assassination Conspiracy: Betrayed by Judas

On April 3, 1968, Walter Bailey, the owner of the Loree Motel received a call from a member of Kings inner circle in Atlanta requesting that a specific room on the second floor be reserve for King. (King had always stayed in a secure room on the 1st floor.) On April 4, Loree Bailey overheard a member of Kings entourage asking him to come out of his room and speak to a small group that had assemble in the parking lot. Lorraine Bailey knew that King was in bed suffering from a severe headache but this member of Kings inner circle insisted that King come out and talk to the people. King reluctantly came out of his room to speak to the small crowd when he was shoot. Loree knew the identity of the Judas who had Dr. King set-up to be assassinated.

Was the Judas following orders from his Masonic Master?

Loree Bailey was killed, hung in the stairwell of her motel immediately after the assassination. The official cover-up statement said that Loree Bailey had a stroke on April 4th and died a few days later.

Who was the Judas who set-up King? Was King assassination a Masonic hit? Was a beer distributorship part of the payoff?

Across from the LorraineMotel was Fire Station no. 2. Who ordered … to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, your …

www.tucradio.org/Who_killed_MLK.pdf

In the complaint filed by the King family, “King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators,” the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies — particularly the FBI and Army intelligence — with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.

I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, “Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?”

Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.

But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government’s “sovereign immunity,” it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind King’s martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty as charged.

We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.

Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William Pepper’s progress as James Earl Ray’s attorney in uncovering Jowers’s role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police “wouldn’t be there that night.”

In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim’s Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.

As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe, other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto’s involvement in King’s slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:15 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto’s warehouse in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, “Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony.”

Café-owner Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto’s in the late 1970’s, testified that Liberto had told her he “had Martin Luther King killed.” Addison’s son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.

“[Liberto] said, `I didn’t kill the nigger but I had it done.’ I said, `What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?’ He says, `Ahh, he wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man . . . a setup man.'”

The jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King’s son Dexter and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim’s Grill. He said the planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCollough (who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency, and who is referenced in the trial transcript as Merrell McCullough), MPD Lieutentant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a third police officer, and two men Jowers did not know but thought were federal agents.

Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape identifying McCollough as the man kneeling beside King’s body on the balcony in a famous photograph. According to witness Colby Vernon Smith, McCollough had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders, which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was “the guy who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see Martin.”

Jowers says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim’s Grill from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day. Jowers said he didn’t actually see who fired the shot that killed King, but thought it was Clark, the MPD’s best marksman.

Young testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that the aging, ailing Jowers “wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to confess it and be free of it.” Jowers denied, however, that he knew the plot’s purpose was to kill King — a claim that seemed implausible to Dexter King and Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had directed Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn’t know the target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson suggests he was not naïve on this point.

Loyd Jowers’s story opened the door to testimony that explored the systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic areas:

James Lawson, King’s friend and an organizer with SCLC, testified that King’s stands on Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign had created enemies in Washington. He said King’s speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam War and identified the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI.

Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income.

“I have no doubt,” Lawson said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination.”

Coretta Scott King testified that her husband had to return to Memphis in early April 1968 because of a violent demonstration there for which he had been blamed. Moments after King arrived in Memphis to join the sanitation workers’ march there on March 28, 1968, the scene turned violent — subverted by government provocateurs, Lawson said. Thus King had to return to Memphis on April 3 and prepare for a truly nonviolent march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC could still carry out a nonviolent campaign in Washington.

Local conspiracy

On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum, a black firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On his return home, Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and was told he had been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from Fire Station 2, located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to Fire Station 31. Newsum testified that he was not needed at the new station. However, he was needed at his old station because his departure left it “out of service unless somebody else was detailed to my company in my stead.” After making many queries, Newsum was eventually told he had been transferred by request of the police department.

The only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E. Wallace, testified that he, too, received orders from his superior officer on the night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire station far removed from the Lorraine Motel. He was later told vaguely that he had been threatened.

Wallace guessed it was because “I was putting out fires,” he told the jury with a smile. Asked if he ever received a satisfactory explanation for his transfer Wallace answered, “No. Never did. Not to this day.”

In the March-April Probe, Mike Vinson described the similar removal of Ed Redditt, a black Memphis Police Department detective, from his Fire Station 2 surveillance post two hours before King’s murder.

To understand the Redditt incident, it is important to note that it was Redditt himself who initiated his watch on Dr. King from the firehouse across the street. Redditt testified that when King’s party and the police accompanying them (including Detective Redditt) arrived from the airport at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, he “noticed something that was unusual.” When Inspector Don Smith, who was in charge of security, told Redditt he could leave, Redditt “noticed there was nobody else there. In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King [when Redditt had been part of a black security team for King], we stayed with him. I saw nobody with him. So I went across the street and asked the Fire Department could we come in and observe from the rear, which we did.” Given Redditt’s concerns for King’s safety, his particular watch on the Lorraine may not have fit into others’ plans.

Redditt testified that late in the afternoon of April 4, MPD Intelligence Officer Eli Arkin came to Fire Station 2 to take him to Central Headquarters. There Police and Fire Director Frank Holloman (formerly an FBI agent for 25 years, seven of them as supervisor of J. Edgar Hoover’s office) ordered Redditt home, against his wishes and accompanied by Arkin. The reason Holloman gave Redditt for his removal from the King watch Redditt had initiated the day before was that his life had been threatened.

In an interview after the trial, Redditt told me the story of how his 1978 testimony on this question before the House Select Committee on Assassinations was part of a heavily pressured cover-up. “It was a farce,” he said, “a total farce.”

Redditt had been subpoenaed by the HSCA to testify, as he came to realize, not so much on his strange removal from Fire Station 2 as the fact that he had spoken about it openly to writers and researchers. The HSCA focused narrowly on the discrepancy between Redditt’s surveiling King (as he was doing) and acting as security (an impression Redditt had given writers interviewing him) in order to discredit the story of his removal. Redditt was first grilled by the committee for eight straight hours in a closed executive session. After a day of hostile questioning, Redditt finally said late in the afternoon, “I came here as a friend of the investigation, not as an enemy of the investigation. You don’t want to deal with the truth.” He told the committee angrily that if the secret purpose behind the King conspiracy was, like the JFK conspiracy, “to protect the country, just tell the American people! They’ll be happy! And quit fooling the folks and trying to pull the wool over their eyes.”

When the closed hearing was over, Redditt received a warning call from a friend in the White House who said, “Man, your life isn’t worth a wooden nickel.”

Redditt said his public testimony the next day “was a set-up”: “The bottom line on that one was that Senator Baker decided that I wouldn’t go into this open hearing without an attorney. When the lawyer and I arrived at the hearing, we were ushered right back out across town to the executive director in charge of the investigation. [We] looked through a book, to look at the questions and answers.”

“So in essence what they were saying was: `This is what you’re going to answer to, and this is how you’re going to answer.’ It was all made up — all designed, questions and answers, what to say and what not to say. A total farce.”

Former MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the witness stand. Williams had been responsible for forming a special security unit of black officers whenever King came to Memphis (the unit Redditt had served on earlier). Williams took pride in providing the best possible protection for Dr. King, which included, he said, advising him never to stay at the Lorraine “because we couldn’t furnish proper security there.” (“It was just an open view,” he explained to me later, “Anybody could . . . There was no protection at all. To me that was a set-up from the very beginning.”)

Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income. “I have no doubt,” Lawson said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination.”

For King’s April 3, 1968 arrival, however, Williams was for some reason not asked to form the special black bodyguard. He was told years later by his inspector (a man whom Jowers identified as a participant in the planning meetings at Jim’s Grill) that the change occurred because somebody in King’s entourage had asked specifically for no black security officers. Williams told the jury he was bothered by the omission “even to this day.”

Leon Cohen, a retired New York City police officer, testified that in 1968 he had become friendly with the Lorraine Motel’s owner and manager, Walter Bailey (now deceased). On the morning after King’s murder, Cohen spoke with a visibly upset Bailey outside his office at the Lorraine. Bailey told Cohen about a strange request that had forced him to change King’s room to the location where he was shot.

Bailey explained that the night before King’s arrival he had received a call “from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta.” The caller (whom Bailey said he knew but referred to only by the pronoun “he”) wanted the motel owner to change King’s room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to moving King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room exposed to public view.

“If they had listened to me,” Bailey said, “this wouldn’t have happened.”

Philip Melanson, author of the Martin Luther King Assassination (1991), described his investigation into the April 4 pullback of four tactical police units that had been patrolling the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. Melanson asked MPD Inspector Sam Evans (now deceased), commander of the units, why they were pulled back the morning of April 4, in effect making an assassin’s escape much easier. Evans said he gave the order at the request of a local pastor connected with King’s party, Rev. Samuel Kyles. (Melanson wrote in his book that Kyles emphatically denied making any such request.) Melanson said the idea that MPD security would be determined at such a time by a local pastor’s request made no sense whatsoever.

Olivia Catling lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street. Catling had planned to walk down the street the evening of April 4 in the hope of catching a glimpse of King at the motel. She testified that when she heard the shot a little after six o’clock, she said, “Oh, my God, Dr. King is at that hotel!” She ran with her two children to the corner of Mulberry and Huling streets, just north of the Lorraine. She saw a man in a checkered shirt come running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine. The man jumped into a green 1965 Chevrolet just as a police car drove up behind him. He gunned the Chevrolet around the corner and up Mulberry past Catling’s house moving her to exclaim, “It’s going to take us six months to pay for the rubber he’s burning up!!” The police, she said, ignored the man and blocked off a street, leaving his car free to go the opposite way.

I visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she had seen running was not James Earl Ray. “I will go into my grave saying that was not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was heavier than Ray.”

“The police,” she told me, “asked not one neighbor [around the Lorraine], `What did you see?’ Thirty-one years went by. Nobody came and asked one question. I often thought about that. I even had nightmares over that, because they never said anything. How did they let him get away?”

Catling also testified that from her vantage point on the corner of Mulberry and Huling she could see a fireman standing alone across from the motel when the police drove up. She heard him say to the police, “The shot came from that clump of bushes,” indicating the heavily overgrown brushy area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2.

The crime scene

Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony, Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m. When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at the Lorraine’s balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any authorities.

In a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange that was read into the record, Orange said that on April 4, “James Bevel and I were driven around by Marrell McCollough, a person who at that time we knew to be a member of the Invaders, a local community organizing group, and who we subsequently learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis Police Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency . . . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King’s leg dangling over the balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn’t have been more than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King’s life, was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict buildings.

“I also remember then turning my attention back to the balcony and seeing Marrell McCollough up on the balcony kneeling over Dr. King, looking as though he was checking Dr. King for life signs.

“I also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o’clock, that all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming house had been cleared . . .

“I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.

“When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way.

“I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968.”

Also read into the record were depositions made by Solomon Jones to the FBI and to the Memphis police. Jones was King’s chauffeur in Memphis. The FBI document, dated April 13, 1968, says that after King was shot, when Jones looked across Mulberry Street into the brushy area, “he got a quick glimpse of a person with his back toward Mulberry Street. . . . This person was moving rather fast, and he recalls that he believed he was wearing some sort of light-colored jacket with some sort of a hood or parka.” In his 11:30 p.m., April 4, 1968 police interview, Jones provides the same basic information concerning a person leaving the brushy area hurriedly.

Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans “requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination.” Stiles called another superintendent of sanitation, who assembled a crew. “They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.” Stiles identified the site as an area overgrown with brush and bushes across from the Lorraine Motel.

Within hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.

The rifle

Probe readers will again recall from Mike Vinson’s article three key witnesses in the Memphis trial who offered evidence counter to James Earl Ray’s rifle being the murder weapon:

Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over two years of hearings on the rifle, testified that “67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle.” He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet taken from King’s body, and therefore were from a different lot of ammunition. And because the rifle’s scope had not been sited, Brown said, “this weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a barn.” Holding up the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle, Judge Brown told the jury, “It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon.”

Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama, had been Ray’s attorney in 1968. (On the eve of his trial, Ray replaced Hanes and his father, Arthur Hanes Sr., by Percy Foreman, a decision Ray told the Haneses one week later was the biggest mistake of his life.) Hanes testified that in the summer of 1968 he interviewed Guy Canipe, owner of the Canipe Amusement Company. Canipe was a witness to the dropping in his doorway of a bundle that held a trove of James Earl Ray memorabilia, including the rifle, unfired bullets, and a radio with Ray’s prison identification number on it. This dropped bundle, heaven (or otherwise) sent for the State’s case against Ray, can be accepted as credible evidence through a willing suspension of disbelief. As Judge Hanes summarized the State’s lone-assassin theory (with reference to an exhibit depicting the scene), “James Earl Ray had fired the shot from the bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his room and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had proceeded across the walkway the length of the building to the back where that stair from that door came up, had come down the stairs out the door, placed the Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe entryway.” Then Ray presumably got in his car seconds before the police’s arrival, driving from downtown Memphis to Atlanta unchallenged in his white Mustang.

Concerning his interview with the witness who was the cornerstone of this theory, Judge Hanes told the jury that Guy Canipe (now deceased) provided “terrific evidence”: “He said that the package was dropped in his doorway by a man headed south down Main Street on foot, and that this happened at about ten minutes before the shot was fired [emphasis added].”

Hanes thought Canipe’s witnessing the bundle-dropping ten minutes before the shot was very credible for another reason. It so happened (as confirmed by Philip Melanson’s research) that at 6:00 p.m. one of the MPD tactical units that had been withdrawn earlier by Inspector Evans, TACT 10, had returned briefly to the area with its 16 officers for a rest break at Fire Station 2. Thus, as Hanes testified, with the firehouse brimming with police, some already watching King across the street, “when they saw Dr. King go down, the fire house erupted like a beehive . . . In addition to the time involved [in Ray’s presumed odyssey from the bathroom to the car], it was circumstantially almost impossible to believe that somebody had been able to throw that [rifle] down and leaave right in the face of that erupting fire station.”

When I spoke with Judge Hanes after the trial about the startling evidence he had received from Canipe, he commented, “That’s what I’ve been saying for 30 years.”

William Hamblin testified not about the rifle thrown down in the Canipe doorway but rather the smoking rifle Loyd Jowers said he received at his back door from Earl Clark right after the shooting. Hamblin recounted a story he was told many times by his friend James McCraw, who had died.

James McCraw is already well-known to researchers as the taxi driver who arrived at the rooming house to pick up Charlie Stephens shortly before 6:00 p.m. on April 4. In a deposition read earlier to the jury, McCraw said he found Stephens in his room lying on his bed too drunk to get up, so McCraw turned out the light and left without him — minutes before Stephens, according to the State, identified Ray in profile passing down the hall from the bathroom. McCraw also said the bathroom door next to Stephen’s room was standing wide open, and there was no one in the bathroom — where again, according to the State, Ray was then balancing on the tub, about to squeeze the trigger.

William Hamblin told the jury that he and fellow cab-driver McCraw were close friends for about 25 years. Hamblin said he probably heard McCraw tell the same rifle story 50 times, but only when McCraw had been drinking and had his defenses down.

In that story, McCraw said that Loyd Jowers had given him the rifle right after the shooting. According to Hamblin, “Jowers told him to get the [rifle] and get it out of here now. [McCraw] said that he grabbed his beer and snatched it out. He had the rifle rolled up in an oil cloth, and he leapt out the door and did away with it.” McCraw told Hamblin he threw the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.

Hamblin said McCraw never revealed publicly what he knew of the rifle because, like Jowers, he was afraid of being indicted: “He really wanted to come out with it, but he was involved in it. And he couldn’t really tell the truth.”

William Pepper accepted Hamblin’s testimony about McCraw’s disposal of the rifle over Jowers’s claim to Dexter King that he gave the rifle to Raul. Pepper said in his closing argument that the actual murder weapon had been lying “at the bottom of the Mississippi River for over thirty-one years.”

Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans “requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination. . . . They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.” . . . Within hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.

Raul

One of the most significant developments in the Memphis trial was the emergence of the mysterious Raul through the testimony of a series of witnesses.

In a 1995 deposition by James Earl Ray that was read to the jury, Ray told of meeting Raul in Montreal in the summer of 1967, three months after Ray had escaped from a Missouri prison. According to Ray, Raul guided Ray’s movements, gave him money for the Mustang car and the rifle, and used both to set him up in Memphis.

Andrew Young and Dexter King described their meeting with Jowers and Pepper at which Pepper had shown Jowers a spread of photographs, and Jowers picked out one as the person named Raul who brought him the rifle to hold at Jim’s Grill. Pepper displayed the same spread of photos in court, and Young and King pointed out the photo Jowers had identified as Raul. (Private investigator John Billings said in separate testimony that this picture was a passport photograph from 1961, when Raul had immigrated from Portugal to the U.S.)

The additional witnesses who identified the photo as Raul’s included: British merchant seaman Sidney Carthew, who in a videotaped deposition from England said he had met Raul (who offered to sell him guns) and a man he thinks was Ray (who wanted to be smuggled onto his ship) in Montreal in the summer of 1967; Glenda and Roy Grabow, who recognized Raul as a gunrunner they knew in Houston in the `60s and `70s and who told Glenda in a rage that he had killed Martin Luther King; Royce Wilburn, Glenda’s brother, who also knew Raul in Houston; and British television producer Jack Saltman, who had obtained the passport photo and showed it to Ray in prison, who identified it as the photo of the person who had guided him.

Saltman and Pepper, working on independent investigations, located Raul in 1995. He was living quietly with his family in the northeastern U.S. It was there in 1997 that journalist Barbara Reis of the Lisbon Publico, working on a story about Raul, spoke with a member of his family. Reis testified that she had spoken in Portuguese to a woman in Raul’s family who, after first denying any connection to Ray’s Raul, said “they” had visited them. “Who?” Reis asked. “The government,” said the woman. She said government agents had visited them three times over a three-year period. The government, she said, was watching over them and monitoring their phone calls. The woman took comfort and satisfaction in the fact that her family (so she believed) was being protected by the government.

In his closing argument Pepper said of Raul: “Now, as I understand it, the defense had invited Raul to appear here. He is outside this jurisdiction, so a subpoena would be futile. But he was asked to appear here. In earlier proceedings there were attempts to depose him, and he resisted them. So he has not attempted to come forward at all and tell his side of the story or to defend himself.”

A broader conspiracy

Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified that he was on duty the morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers approached him. The officers said they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine Motel. Weeden said they carried briefcases and indicated they had cameras. Weeden showed the officers to the roof of the fire station. He left them at the edge of its northeast corner behind a parapet wall. From there the Army officers had a bird’s-eye view of Dr. King’s balcony doorway and could also look down on the brushy area adjacent to the fire station.

The testimony of writer Douglas Valentine filled in the background of the men Carthel Weeden had taken up to the roof of Fire Station 2. While Valentine was researching his book The Phoenix Program (1990), on the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence program against Vietnamese villagers, he talked with veterans in military intelligence who had been re-deployed from the Vietnam War to the sixties antiwar movement. They told him that in 1968 the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept Martin Luther King under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in Memphis April 4. As Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program, they “reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away.”

Testimony which juror David Morphy later described as “awesome” was that of former CIA operative Jack Terrell, a whistle-blower in the Iran-Contra scandal. Terrell, who was dying of liver cancer in Florida, testified by videotape that his close friend J.D. Hill had confessed to him that he had been a member of an Army sniper team in Memphis assigned to shoot “an unknown target” on April 4. After training for a triangular shooting, the snipers were on their way into Memphis to take up positions in a watertower and two buildings when their mission was suddenly cancelled. Hill said he realized, when he learned of King’s assassination the next day, that the team must have been part of a contingency plan to kill King if another shooter failed.

Terrell said J.D. Hill was shot to death. His wife was charged with shooting Hill (in response to his drinking), but she was not indicted. From the details of Hill’s death, Terrell thought the story about Hill’s wife shooting him was a cover, and that his friend had been assassinated. In an interview, Terrell said the CIA’s heavy censorship of his book Disposable Patriot (1992) included changing the paragraph on J.D. Hill’s death, so that it read as if Terrell thought Hill’s wife was responsible.

Cover-up

Walter Fauntroy, Dr. King’s colleague and a 20-year member of Congress, chaired the subcommittee of the 1976-78 House Select Committee on Assassinations that investigated King’s assassination. Fauntroy testified in Memphis that in the course of the HSCA investigation “it was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces.” He discovered electronic bugs on his phone and TV set. When Richard Sprague, HSCA’s first chief investigator, said he would make available all CIA, FBI, and military intelligence records, he became a focus of controversy. Sprague was forced to resign. His successor made no demands on U.S. intelligence agencies. Such pressures contributed to the subcommittee’s ending its investigation, as Fauntroy said, “without having thoroughly investigated all of the evidence that was apparent.” Its formal conclusion was that Ray assassinated King, that he probably had help, and that the government was not involved.

When I interviewed Fauntroy in a van on his way back to the Memphis Airport, I asked about the implications of his statements in an April 4, 1997 Atlanta Constitution article. The article said Fauntroy now believed “Ray did not fire the shot that killed King and was part of a larger conspiracy that possibly involved federal law enforcement agencies, ” and added: “Fauntroy said he kept silent about his suspicions because of fear for himself and his family.”

Fauntroy told me that when he left Congress in 1991 he had the opportunity to read through his files on the King assassination, including raw materials that he’d never seen before. Among them was information from J. Edgar Hoover’s logs. There he learned that in the three weeks before King’s murder the FBI chief held a series of meetings with “persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence in the Phoenix operation in Southeast Asia.” Why? Fauntroy also discovered there had been Green Berets and military intelligence agents in Memphis when King was killed. “What were they doing there?” he asked.

When Fauntroy had talked about his decision to write a book about what he’d “uncovered since the assassination committee closed down,” he was promptly investigated and charged by the Justice Department with having violated his financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer told him that he could not understand why the Justice Department would bring up a charge on the technicality of one misdated check. Fauntroy said he interpreted the Justice Department’s action to mean: “Look, we’ll get you on something if you continue this way. . . . I just thought: I’ll tell them I won’t go and finish the book, because it’s surely not worth it.”

At the conclusion of his trial testimony, Fauntroy also spoke about his fear of an FBI attempt to kill James Earl Ray when he escaped from Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in June 1977. Congressman Fauntroy had heard reports about an FBI SWAT team having been sent into the area around the prison to shoot Ray and prevent his testifying at the HSCA hearings. Fauntroy asked HSCA chair Louis Stokes to alert Tennesssee Governor Ray Blanton to the danger to the HSCA’s star witness and Blanton’s most famous prisoner. When Stokes did, Blanton called off the FBI SWAT team, Ray was caught safely by local authorities, and in Fauntroy’s words, “we all breathed a sigh of relief.”

The Memphis jury also learned how a 1993-98 Tennessee State investigation into the King assassination was, if not a cover-up, then an inquiry noteworthy for its lack of witnesses. Lewis Garrison had subpoenaed the head of the investigation, Mark Glankler, in an effort to discover evidence helpful to Jowers’s defense. William Pepper then cross-examined Glankler on the witnesses he had interviewed in his investigation:

So it goes — downhill. The above is Glankler’s high-water mark: He got two out of the first ten (if one counts Charles and Peggy Hurley as a yes). Pepper questioned Glankler about 25 key witnesses. The jury was familiar with all of them from prior testimony in the trial. Glankler could recall his office interviewing a total of three. At the twenty-fifth-named witness, Earl Caldwell, Pepper finally let Glankler go:

Q. Did you ever interview a former New York Times journalist, a New York Daily News correspondent named Earl Caldwell?

A. Earl Caldwell? Not that I recall.

Q. You never interviewed him in the course of your investigation?

A. I just don’t recall that name.

MR. PEPPER: I have no further comments about this investigation — no further questions for this investigator.

Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today it is much worse in my view” — “the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being actived by King].”

To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.

The vision behind the trial

In his sprawling, brilliant work that underlies the trial, Orders to Kill (1995), William Pepper introduced readers to most of the 70 witnesses who took the stand in Memphis or were cited by deposition, tape, and other witnesses. To keep this article from reading like either an encyclopedia or a Dostoevsky novel, I have highlighted only a few. (Thanks to the King Center, the full trial trascript is available online at http://www.thekingcenter.com/tkc/trial.html.) What Pepper’s work has accomplished in print and in court can be measured by the intensity of the media attacks on him, shades of Jim Garrison. But even Garrison did not gain the support of the Kennedy family (in his case) or achieve a guilty verdict. The Memphis trial has opened wide a door to our assassination politics. Anyone who walks through it is faced by an either/or: to declare naked either the empire or oneself.

The King family has chosen the former. The vision behind the trial is at least as much theirs as it is William Pepper’s, for ultimately it is the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta King explained to the jury her family’s purpose in pursuing the lawsuit against Jowers: “This is not about money. We’re concerned about the truth, having the truth come out in a court of law so that it can be documented for all. I’ve always felt that somehow the truth would be known, and I hoped that I would live to see it. It is important I think for the sake of healing so many people — my family, other people, the nation.”

Dexter King, the plaintiffs’ final witness, said the trial was about why his father had been killed: “From a holistic side, in terms of the people, in terms of the masses, yes, it has to be dealt with because it is not about who killed Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not necessarily about all of those details. It is about: Why was he killed? Because if you answer the why, you will understand the same things are still happening. Until we address that, we’re all in trouble. Because if it could happen to him, if it can happen to this family, it can happen to anybody.

“It is so amazing for me that as soon as this issue of potential involvement of the federal government came up, all of a sudden the media just went totally negative against the family. I couldn’t understand that. I kept asking my mother, `What is going on?’

“She reminded me. She said, `Dexter, your dad and I have lived through this once already. You have to understand that when you take a stand against the establishment, first, you will be attacked. There is an attempt to discredit. Second, [an attempt] to try and character-assassinate. And third, ultimately physical termination or assassination.’

“Now the truth of the matter is if my father had stopped and not spoken out, if he had just somehow compromised, he would probably still be here with us today. But the minute you start talking about redistribution of wealth and stopping a major conflict, which also has economic ramifications . . . “

In his closing argument, William Pepper identified economic power as the root reason for King’s assassination: “When Martin King opposed the war, when he rallied people to oppose the war, he was threatening the bottom lines of some of the largest defense contractors in this country. This was about money. He was threatening the weapons industry, the hardware, the armaments industries, that would all lose as a result of the end of the war.

“The second aspect of his work that also dealt with money that caused a great deal of consternation in the circles of power in this land had to do with his commitment to take a massive group of people to Washington. . . . Now he began to talk about a redistribution of wealth, in this the wealthiest country in the world.”

Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today it is much worse in my view” — “the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being actived by King].”

To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.

Dexter King testified to the truth of his father’s death with transforming clarity: “If what you are saying goes against what certain people believe you should be saying, you will be dealt with — maybe not the way you are dealt with in China, which is overtly. But you will be dealt with covertly. The result is the same.

“We are talking about a political assassination in modern-day times, a domestic political assassination. Of course, it is ironic, but I was watching a special on the CIA. They say, `Yes, we’ve participated in assassinations abroad but, no, we could never do anything like that domestically.’ Well, I don’t know. . . . Whether you call it CIA or some other innocuous acronym or agency, killing is killing.

“The issue becomes: What do we do about this? Do we endorse a policy in this country, in this life, that says if we don’t agree with someone, the only means to deal with it is through elimination and termination? I think my father taught us the opposite, that you can overcome without violence.

“We’re not in this to make heads roll. We’re in this to use the teachings that my father taught us in terms of nonviolent reconciliation. It works. We know that it works. So we’re not looking to put people in prison. What we’re looking to do is get the truth out so that this nation can learn and know officially. If the family of the victim, if we’re saying we’re willing to forgive and embark upon a process that allows for reconciliation, why can’t others?”

When pressed by Pepper to name a specific amount of damages for the death of his father, Dexter King said, “One hundred dollars.”

The Verdict

The jury returned with a verdict after two and one-half hours. Judge James E. Swearengen of Shelby County Circuit Court, a gentle African-American man in his last few days before retirement, read the verdict aloud. The courtroom was now crowded with spectators, almost all black.

“In answer to the question, `Did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King?’ your answer is `Yes.'” The man on my left leaned forward and whispered softly, “Thank you, Jesus.”

The judge continued: “Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?’ Your answer to that one is also `Yes.'” An even more heartfelt whisper: “Thank you, Jesus!”

Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.

Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its “limited re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up — just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

David Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: “We can look back on it and say that we did change history. But that’s not why we did it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and just too many odd coincidences.

“Everything from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very, very odd.”

I drove the few blocks to the house on Mulberry Street, one block north of the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum). When I rapped loudly on Olivia Catling’s security door, she was several minutes in coming. She said she’d had the flu. I told her the jury’s verdict, and she smiled. “So I can sleep now. For years I could still hear that shot. After 31 years, my mind is at ease. So I can sleep now, knowing that some kind of peace has been brought to the King family. And that’s the best part about it.”

Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.

Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its “limited re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up — just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

The faithful in a nonviolent movement that hopes to change the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S.A. — as Dr. King’s vision, if made real, would have done in 1968 — should be willing to receive the same kind of reward that King did in Memphis. As each of our religious traditions has affirmed from the beginning, that recurring story of martyrdom (“witness”) is one of ultimate transformation and cosmic good news